This is hard to write. I imagine that might make this hard to read as well. A big part of me doesn’t feel like I can publish these words and is terrified at the thought. But it’s that very part of me that is also whispering, keep going. I want to give voice to what hides. I want to trust that what is revealed is tied to our freedom. That is my intention, to push beyond the wall that was built for protection, but now is keeping me from the very thing I seek. When the lines between what we fear and what we long for start to dissipate. When it’s time to name our desires, even if it means finding them in the dark places we have been avoiding. I hope you can trust me enough to keep going with me. I will do my best to hold us in this discomfort. This is me trying to find a clearing in the woods so the moonlight can give shape to what I cannot see.

At some point, a script was written. I’m not sure when. I imagine it was written long before I arrived. And in conscious and unconscious ways I have studied it ever since. Memorized it. Embodied it. I think it first became conscious when I was 7. The first time hands, not my own, touched parts deemed private. Without my invitation. Without my say in any of it. My petrified silence. Totally unprepared and unsure of how to navigate that full body confusion. Him, 10 years my senior, a troubled kid from a troubled family that went to our church.

I can still see the dirty bar of Ivory soap stuck with wet slippery stick to their bathroom sink. I can still see his room—in my memory a shrine for ceiling high piles of dirty magazines. The beginning of my deep dislike for pornography. Glossy and farcical. Charged with energy that felt too large for its two-dimensional reducing. One-sided and dangerously misguided, representing nothing that felt true to my body.

Never has my pussy been bald and thin and cotton candy pink. Never my tits so huge they remain mountainous while reclining. Never has my my naked skin looked slick and shiny while perched backwards, ass up, cooter out, balancing on a stationary motorbike. Never have I liked being stretched out by more than one appendage or blinded by the white warm haze of some shaggy-haired man’s emission. Never.

Though in moments, I have tried.

To find some way to be acceptable, desirable, appropriate for this highly proliferated and limited version of what is sexy. Of what is sex. I’ve tried waxing my bush. Paying someone hard earned money to torture me. Walking home chicken-skinned and sticking to newly exposed parts of myself. I’ve doused myself in coconut oil and stood with my tits topless in the freezer hoping to make my marshmallowy soft nipples look more like the requisite eraser tips. I’ve tried to like things I did not like. I’ve tried to want things I did not want. I have tried to move so much faster than I wanted to go.

I have come to relate to sex as something to desire and protect myself from in equal measure. Something I have ached for only to be afflicted by. It has been a complicated mix of excitement and regret. Release and re-wounding. Always trying to untangle the terror from the full-body hoping for pleasure. Trying to peel back all the layers to reveal the deep and pure need for letting go. Letting it be okay to want something that exists beyond my careful controlling. Letting it be okay to want to do all the things I was taught I shouldn’t want to do, but my body just goes right on wanting.

Just wanting to enjoy the beauty that lies underneath all the guilt, all the fumbling. All the shame and complication. Aching to find my way beyond the insecurity and the fear. Continuing to feel that such a thing is possible. That such a place exists. Despite all the times I’ve ended up buried somewhere in-between.

Sex has made me pee blood. Sex has sent me to the emergency room. Sex has made me hide my face in the sheets. Sex has yielded some of the most beautiful and life-affirming moments of my life. The most ecstatic and euphoric joy. The deepest connection. The most of all the things I am always wanting to feel. And that is why I keep trying. We try for that. We get so many variations on the way there. Some somewhat forgettable. Some undeniably damaging.

It is so charged. Its potency unrivaled. It is this elixir of life that we mix and we drink, participating in, almost trance-like with the alchemy of life-making. We fuck, therefore we exist. Perhaps it is this very hugeness that has inspired the reductiveness of The Script.

I’m not sure how much involvement I had in the writing of this script I have followed countless times. But I have definitely followed its dialogue and plot lines with relative dedication for well over twenty years. I have made edits here and there. Amendments. Improvements one could say. But even now, 38 years around the sun, I still find myself unwittingly falling into the ruts of its well worn narrative.

The script I’m talking about is the one I almost imperceptibly slip into, read by rote anytime the potential for S. E. X. presents itself. Before I give myself adequate time to assess whether or not sex is even what I am wanting in the moment. Seeking intimacy, I sometimes mistake sexual tension as a bridge towards it, rather than the precise fuel needed to burn the motherfucker down. And so, in the midst of that potent hoping, I skip the necessary step of slowing things down. Failing to check in with myself before I proceed to unconsciously visit ghosts of hook ups past.

Oh! The dude is kissing me! Oh! It’s happening! He’s kissing me! His tongue is pretty okay. I don’t hate it (notice the low standards for proceeding into intensely vulnerable territory). I can’t really tell how I feel about this…

Break out the script! All (or at least most) systems go for autopilot! Click! Click! Click! Moooooaaan. He’s following his script and starting to touch your breasts on top of your shirt. Be reluctant, but allowing when he lifts your shirt to put his mouth to your nipples as he has perfectly memorized to do. Wonder how much of him is currently in autopilot too?… Let him know you’re interested (even if you’re not really), by checking in with his hardness felt through denim. If he’s not wearing denim, don’t worry, it’s more or less the same. Here it is okay to improvise a little with cotton or linen, though hopefully not polyester. Polyester feels too closely to the lie you are trying to tell. That synthetic self-reflection might make you pause to wonder. Might make you hesitate in your recognition of the ridiculousness of the moment. Might make you change your mind. Do not change your mind! He might turn into a monster. Everything in you is geared towards preventing that greatest of fears. That he is in fact a dangerous monster. Not an equal seeker of that which you are seeking but are currently overriding, with the script.

“Boys will be boys” has always contained within it the message that there is a silent and terrifying contract. Unwanted advances cannot be prevented once things have gone “too far”. Depending on how you dress or how you laugh at his jokes or how many drinks you let him buy, you have most certainly crossed over to the other side. He doesn’t even need to be scary or forceful. He just needs to be a boy being a boy and you will follow your script of sugar and spice and everything necessary to make sure he doesn’t get sexually frustrated. You can’t even imagine what that would do to him! Oh the horror! His nuts might hurt! He might experience discomfort. Pain even. Do not let that happen, or else…

I digress (in hopes of progress).

Back to the script. Now that you have given him the sign that genitals are in play, he will do as he has practiced time and again and make moves towards removing your pants, doing his best to be smooth with the zipper. Hold your breath as you silently pretend you’re not assessing his skill level or confidence, knowing how tense this moment is for you both. Feel no less than one thousands things. Do not pause to wonder what they are. Bulldoze through that wall of uncertainty. Never mind that it is there for your protection.

Ok, we are getting so close to penetration now! You can feel it! It is unsaid and as loud as a freight train. Just a little requisite finger banging first. A moisture test really. Maybe your body is performing well and you are wet enough to avoid extra spit—a trick written in bold in his script. Not wet enough, spit on it! He enters you. You compute how you feel about this, half-in and half-out of your body. Depending on the fit, the rhythm, the willingness, the friction, you can now choose, stay or go? Of course I’m not talking about the bed or the room, only your body. Nowhere in the script is written the option of stopping this train once it is in motion. Nowhere in the script are instructions for how to honestly say you’re realizing now that it is happening—that it’s not actually what you are wanting. Or ready for. Or even enjoying.

What is written in the script is how to make the face that says he’s doing great. You wouldn’t want to crush his spirit! It’s always better to crush your own. This powerful discomfort is your cue to handle what is verging on an invasion with your own vacating. Make more room! Leave your body. Float up to the ceiling. Watch your body from up there. See that faraway look in your eyes and wonder why he isn’t noticing. Resent him for the trespassing, feeling like to anyone really paying attention, the signs are clearly there. Everything has changed. The lights have gone out. Sure sure, you are still making occasional “O” faces and the preconditioned sounds of supposed pleasure. But how can he not feel the thickness of your absence? Is it because nowhere in his script is it written to pay attention to such things? Only to stay hard and not cum too soon. To thrust. To be strong and agile and able to switch positions with authority. Pure mechanics. To leave his body too. Nothing written about what he might want out of the experience beyond his exemplary performance. No consideration of that he might actually be wanting exactly the same thing as you. True connection. An unnamed and shared willingness to forfeit completely the penetrative going through the motions in exchange for honest intimacy.

A seeking of true belonging. Belonging to ourselves. Belonging to our bodies. Our bodies belonging to each other’s belonging. Oh how long we have been longing. To be longing so long you forget to pause when your attempt at receiving might, just might be finally happening.

What if we slowed down?

Built a bridge by looking into each other’s eyes.

Took a breath, together.

Waited to find the strength to say what we were scared to say.

Said what we were feeling. What we were really feeling. All the awkward and terrifying and hopeful truths.

Gave presence to the seemingly impossible and distant question: What do you need right now to feel safe?

And then to listen.

To try and meet each other in our voiced and naked needing. Clothes. Still. On.

And then maybe, to touch. Without the script. Without a blueprint. Just a slow searching. A slow way of knowing.

Letting mouths find wanting mouths in their own pacing.

To kiss.

To communicate.

To engage in communion.

To ignite with desire.

To hold that heat and not just fear for its burning.

To remove the layers. Of clothes. Of doubts. Of painful rememberings. To ride the waves of discomfort. To welcome laughter should it arrive. To allow tears should they fall.

To invite, to open.

To enter.

To feel the potent truth of that closeness. To understand with our bodies what power exists in this space.

I have a desire monster. She is enormous and I am five feet, six and three quarter inches. I generally say I am “five-seven,” because that is one body measurement I have found advantageous to round up. Sometimes I forget I am not a 350-pound line backer. Sometimes I will see a photograph of myself and be surprised by my size. I look so much smaller than I feel. I think it is because somehow, some way, each day, I manage to fit my desire monster inside the relatively tiny space of my lower belly.

As a woman, the world asks the impossible of me. Tend to your body/deny your body. Be firm, soft, full, thin, long-haired and hairless, fragrant, scentless, plumped. And hungry. Know which is appropriate to which parts. Need nothing. There is nothing worse than a needy woman. Quietly wait. When the male gaze responds to your hard work, smile and nod. Do not be afraid (though you may be in grave danger). And do not let them know you have been waiting. If they know you want them there, they may be compelled to leave. You want them to stay. So sit silently, beautifully, perfectly groomed. And whatever you do, DO NOT FART.

I have a desire monster. I am overwhelmed by her thunder. I am afraid others cannot handle her or her hunger. I lose sleep worrying the world won’t let me live here and keep her. I have sung her many songs hoping to lull her to sleep. Afraid the village would lock her up (and me, her kept keeper). But despite the beauty of my singing (or because of the beauty of my singing), I only wake her more.

I have a desire monster. She is insatiable. She breathes life in the form of fire. Air and friction. Oxygen and spark. Many men, too many men, have run from the power of this flame. Moths drawn in by my light, retreating once they feel my heat. I have tried to make the flame smaller, cooler. But the flame refuses to go out. Red hot heat can only burn. And I am looking for the ones who come closer.

Sometimes my desire monster pokes me in the eyes. Tears fall and will not stop. How do we do it? How do we not burst into a million stars? How do we stay here? How do we manage to contain it all? Why are we not all expected to go completely mad in our wanting for nothing and everything all the goddamn time? Sometimes my desire monster pulls my collar bones in opposite directions. Sometimes my desire monster squeezes my upper thighs in that way that makes me laugh vomit. Sometimes my desire monster mistakes my heart for a speed bag. My desire monster will Rocky the fuck out of my dangling heart. And somehow, someway, my heart can take it. My heart is a champ.

I am crying to write this.

I was recently told that I was undeniably a mermaid in a past life. A half this and a half that. An eternal longing for wholeness. An endless ache to make sense. I picture myself with my seashell titties and my long undulating hair. My undulating hips. Underwater breathing. Half of me no doubt drowning, longing for land. The other half perfectly held in a wet embrace.

Always two sides needing different things. Never fully settled in one place. I am a Gemini. I was born the end of May in 1980. I was 9 when The Little Mermaid came out. Though we didn’t have a theater in our tiny Bible Belt town, so I think I saw it a year or two later. I probably watched that movie 3,692 times. I knew every line to every song like it was breathing. I sang them all the time. They called me Ariel in middle school. You couldn’t shut me up. You still can’t. I think I might be ready to stop apologizing for that.

The Big Mermaid, maybe that’s the name of my desire monster. She is sexy and sleek and huge but not impossible to hold. Not if you are huge too. Not if your curiosity is stronger than your fear. Not if you are willing to surrender to not knowing where we are going. Well, are you? I want to know you. Call me. My name is Bethany and my number is written in the stars.

It is not uncommon for me to still randomly break into Ariel's song. Aaaaah aaah aaahh, ah ahh ahhh aaaah aaaaah.

I have let mean old women steal my voice a few times. Many times actually. Mean old women. Mean young women. Scared boys. Scary men. “Here, take it. It is my everything. You can have it.” My hands clutching my throat. My body no longer making sense to me. My song has always been the cord, connecting me to heaven, anchoring me to earth. When I sing I forget there is an end or ever was a beginning.

I recently re-watched The Little Mermaid and wondered for the first time, what the hell happened to Ursula? What drives someone to turn beautiful, vibrant, full-chested Merfolk into weird gray shrimp ghosts trapped in the prison of their own unmet longing? Watching the movie as a grown woman really shifts the perspective. I am now closer in age to Ursula than I am to Ariel. Ursula certainly had a desire monster. Perhaps she simply was a desire monster gone rogue. One thing that is clear is that she was really pissed off about something. Being a woman provides you with plenty to be pissed about. Being a powerful half-woman half-octopus sea-witch probably has a fair share of frustrations. Ursula just wanted to rule the sea. King Titan was holding her back and keeping her down. I’d be pissed too.

I am pissed. Though less so now. Not because there is less to be pissed about. No, there is more. But because I am learning to not let others steal my voice.

I don’t sing as much as my desire monster needs me to. At birth I was gifted the ability to sing my own lullabies. A way to calm my inner screaming child. A way to soothe my desire monster in constant need of soothing. It is hard being alive. A fish lady finally on land, thirsty, longing for sea. I am terrified of the ocean.

My desire monster isn’t afraid of the ocean. She is the ocean, and the infinite wet kisses of water on the shore. My desire monster refuses to ignore the atoms quivering in every thing. Strollin’ along down a (what’s the word again?) streeeeet. She feels the ground as it continually greets her feet. She bears the unbearable urge to say “I LOVE YOU! You are enough! You are beautiful!” to each passing stranger. She smiles at all of them. Some smile back.

My desire monster asks for so much, but I want to believe it’s not too much.

All I want is to sing scorching songs. To whisper great truths. All I want is to be held. And to do the holding. My desire monster makes a great big spoon. All I want is to love and be loved. All I want is to connect. To be a bridge. To be the space between earth and sky. All I want is everything. To be everything in the presence of another’s everything. Too often we only find the courage to be a little bit of everything we are. It is not the content of the secret that wounds, but the keeping.

I am just trying to make sense of me. I miss feeling safe in my watery home. I miss my seashell titties. On a good day my breasts feel full and capable of satisfying a hand. On a not as great day, they feel like sad empty sacks craving a mouth to blow life and form back into them. It’s like they need an audience to show up. Right now I feel like I have the chest of a slightly chubby 8-year-old boy.

I also think I was a slightly chubby 8-year-old boy in a past life. Probably longing for a flatter chest. We are so many things.

I have a desire monster and she wants to suck your dick.

When I was younger I was sure (and terrified) that if I offered up my mouth, a line impossibly long would form instantaneously of dicks eager to fill that space. Now, that I am 37, rooted quite confidently in my power. Greatly connected to my desire monster. Mouth. Wide. Open. No such line is forming.

For most of my life I thought I had to protect myself from the force of the male phallus. You must imagine my surprise (my disappointment) that as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand that they have been protecting themselves all along. Such wasted energy. On both our parts. Our parts. Our parts protected. From what? From pleasure? From connection? From deeper access to higher selves? I wanna be a sexy scuba diver. I wanna go deep. I wanna be a sultry rocket scientist. I wanna blast off. We are not always meant to stay down here.

I will not destroy you. I may destroy you. I may destroy you. But trust me, you are wanting to be destroyed. And the destruction will only make room for more of what you actually are. More of what you have been missing.

You see, I have a truth monster. She is also insatiable. She also breathes fire. She sets buildings aflame. Entire cities burned in a sentence. But they were all things that needed to be burned. It’s not her fault. She simply pointed it out.

I have a truth monster. She just wants to know who you are. Who you truly are. Not who you are afraid you are, so pretend the opposite. Not who you wish you were and therefor never attempt to be. I want to know who you actually are in this very moment. I want to hold you in your truth. I want to meet you in your messiness. I want to match you in your willingness to be seen. I want to lay down with you. I want to lay down my guard. I want to stop pretending that I’m not what I am. A woman full. Full of desire. Hungry for truth. Unwilling to accept less.

I want you here. That is what I long to say. That is what I long to hear.

I fell in love for the first time in the summer of 1995. I was 15. Love washed over me like a tidal wave spelling out the word Y E S. In all caps. The world opened up. The sky got bluer. Ridiculously blue. Flowers became more fragrant. Intoxicating. I was intoxicated by the whole wide world and everything in it. I was intoxicated by the boy. His lips. His lips on my lips. His eyes on my face. His hands on my quivering body. My body. My body exalted. My body seen. Allowing me to see it too, as if for the first time. I became a beautiful cliché. I fell without a choice. I didn’t even know I was falling. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew I never ever ever ever ever wanted it to stop.

But then it did. And the tidal wave became just that. A regular ol’ tidal wave. Crashing down on me. Drowning me in sorrow. I felt like I was dying. A broken heart feels like just that, a heart broken. It hurts in a life threatening way. Which seems appropriate considering it is a vital organ keeping us here, above ground, out of the grave. When it stops, when it gives up, we stop. We want to keep going. We want to keep loving. Love is what tells us our heart is alive.

Somehow I made it through. I found my way back to dry land. It took me five years and many ice cream sandwiches and countless jars of peanut butter and thousands of dollars worth of mediocre Indian food delivered to my tiny Brooklyn apartment and oh so many disappointing nights in smelly bars with sticky floors. But eventually I army crawled my way out of what had been an excruciating spell in exile. Five minutes is a torturously long time to feel cast out of love. Five years was unbearable. And yet, somehow, we bear it.

Evolutionarily speaking, rejection often meant a death sentence. Being cast out of the tribe was a pretty solid guarantee you’d get eaten by a tiger, or choke on a berry by yourself. The literal life or death importance of not being rejected led our brains to create a very powerful reaction to rejection. Neurologically speaking, emotional rejection is felt as physical pain. In one study it was likened to the equivalency of a broken leg. Imagine breaking your leg and then just trying to go about your usual business without properly addressing the wound. Walking around, wincing with every impossible step. Smiling with panicked eyes, saying “I’m fine,” when asked how you’re doing.

Love hurts. But love heals too. And that’s why we keep trying.

In time, I fell in love again. And it did heal certain wounds. And it reopened old ones I had forgotten I had. And it gave me entirely new ones too. And my heart broke again with the ending of another beginning. And once again, the tidal wave. I have been brought to my knees more than once by love. Coughing up. So. Much. Salt. Water. Crawling onto the sand. Unsure of where I’d rather be. Underwater thrashing desperately around. Or alone in stillness on the shore, no longer a part of the ocean.

What hurts about heartbreak is the illusion that forms, that somehow love has been taken away from us. That we are a love castaway. That the best we can hope for (and deserve) is a wonky faced beachball named Wilson. Here’s the thing: LOVE DOESN’T GO ANYWHERE. Love is right where it has always been, in and around you. Everywhere. In the space between the wind and the swaying branches and the dancing leaves. On top of the mountain with a view of the the sun dipping with flourish behind the darkening edge of the earth. In the sheets, damp with tears, alone at night. There love is, where it’s always been, waiting for you to simply know it.

And that’s where I am. Just getting to know love. In the quiet places, and the crowded spaces alike. I am getting to know love, through me. Not through the hypnotic gaze of another. Or the dot dot dot of an unrequited text message. Or the tender (or awkward) embrace of a sexy stranger. I am getting to know love in the sacred home of my body. It’s a revolution. I am well aware of that. Using the same time, focus, energy, attention, intention, affection that I normally POUR into the love and adoration of another. Instead, redirecting that like the loveliest of rainbow colored U-turns, right back to me. Right back to this body. My body. My body is my boyfriend.

And as I make this conscious shift to choose, say a hot date with a book, or a bathtub, or my laptop, versus going blind in the Tinder-sphere, or going cross-eyed looking for someone in a room full of potential soulmates, I start to connect with how it’s all just sort of the same longing. Energetically speaking, there’s very little difference between having sex and writing a poem. The desire to feel alive, connected and seen. The desire to honor the burning swirling need to express. Whether in low shared moans or the singing of a song. The holding of hands or the baking of muffins. Making. Making love or making something, anything, with love. And yes, I will acknowledge, when it’s working well, making love is a really really really nice form of making.

Self-love doesn’t have to mean you give up on dating, or engaging. Self-love isn’t just a lifetime of solitary soaks in quiet apartment bathtubs. It doesn’t have to mean you don’t actually prefer being held in the arms of someone else. I love being held. And sure, I spend a great majority of nights holding myself. But I don’t stop holding myself in my desire to be held by the arms of another. In fact, I think learning to practice self-love in the presence of others is the real challenge. Self-love isn’t the absence of outside love, it’s the maintenance of the capacity to hold and give love, whether alone or in the presence of others.

What self-love is really about is not abandoning the body from which love is given and received. The filter with which you are able to maintain the tender task of love in action. And yes, it is a task. It is, contrary to popular belief, not a feeling. Love is an act of will, of courage, of service, of truth. It takes a tremendous amount of sacrifice. But sacrifice doesn’t have to mean cutting out your own heart and leaving it on an altar as you tragically bleed out waiting for some godlight to stream down from the dark and ominous sky. The word sacrifice comes from the root “to make sacred”. It means no longer pretending that you’re not performing the holiest of tasks when you offer up your heart to the higher plane that love demands.

And where that starts is in your own chest. In your own soft belly. In the warmth and strength of your thighs. The will and grace of your hands. The power of your feet to hold you up and keep you here, firmly planted to this earth. Your ears to hear and your heart to beat. Your lungs to breathe. Your hair to enter into dialogue with the breeze. Your eyes to see and shine and communicate in saltwater when you have been moved by the moonlight. My body is my boyfriend. She wants me to know her. She wants me to listen. To respond to her text messages. To massage her when she’s sore. To hold her when she’s scared. To laugh with her when she’s dancing like a sassy gorilla in her granny panties. My body wants me to promise not to leave. To stay. To honor her needs. To know, that as other people may, and will, come and go, I will always be here with her. Loving her. Holding her, as she has always been holding me.

How many times can a heart break and still retain its shape? Its basic ability to work. To pump blood. To love.

I loved you. This pain tells me I still do. And even still I am learning to accept that love isn’t enough to keep us alive. Water and air. Patience and space. I am loving you by leaving you alone. I am loving you by surrendering my hope. I am loving you by letting you go. All I have ever wanted was to feel safe enough to stay.

I didn’t feel safe with you.

I know I played the role of that woman. Too well. Decades spent rehearsing. You played your corresponding role well too. You were good at being scary. And not in physical ways that would have made you easy to leave. But in subtler ways. In ways that made me question my own sanity. Had we each entered in secure in our separate skin, perhaps it would have looked different, you and I. But instead you and I equaled the perfect play of shadow on shadow. Together our darkness eclipsed our light.

It broke both of our hearts. I know that. I know this pain is not my own alone. The aching plane we share, even now, apart. We became a part of one another, lines blurring, blame spreading out like blood on wet skin.

Clichés are clichés for a reason. I am a cliché and I have plenty of reasons. Female obsession, is there a more powerful force? Mine capable of building and destroying entire cities in the minutes of an hour depending on how well I slept the night before. My tears can flood entire continents mourning the loss of men I have loved. I have loved them so deeply. So deeply my insides have ceased to feel right. Something has been carved into me. The belief that loving them would make everything alright.

Things have not been alright for some time now. It’s no one’s fault. We tried. We tried until we lost touch with what it felt like to not have to try so hard. We tried so hard, you and I.

Obsession is a response to feeling you don’t have control of your life, your body, your circumstance. What is deemed unhealthy is oftentimes born of the healthy desire to be alright. To feel safe. To have agency over your life. Women have been well aware of their lack of control over such things for millennia. My obsession has never been about men. It’s been about wanting a voice in a world that has been tuned to hear only what the men are saying. Perhaps I didn’t need them to love me as much as I needed to piggyback on their right to have a choice. Accepting powerlessness is its own form of madness. More than anything I have wanted a right to my own sanity. My own safety.

With every man I have loved, I have surrendered my own sense of correctness. The deeper I fell, the further I strayed from the seat of my own knowing. Confusion taking the place of my ability to direct my own course. Time and again I wandered off into the woods. Dappled light giving way to the darkness of self doubt. I became desperate, frantically waiting for the flash of their light. Their approval to find my way back to the path. A path I was firmly forging on my own when I first met them. What was my own making, insidiously becoming dependent upon their acknowledgment. It is crippling. Slowly the light goes out of me. I disappear. I am lost. I ask the man I love to find me and that only makes him angry. He too misses the woman I was before I met him.

And who is to blame? Myself? The world I was formed in? These men who despite good intentions aren’t working hard enough to right the wrongs of the broken system that favors them?

This question has become increasingly more difficult for me to answer. When I was younger I clung to the comfort of the well-defined lines of black and white thinking. Women were the victims, men the perpetrators. And now? Now I see such an endless and hazy gray. My eyes burn from trying to make a clear picture out of a world that is on fire. Scorched earth hoping for rain. What I see now is a world full of deeply wounded men. What I see now is the sea of pain men are drowning in as they pull us under. I see this more clearly every day. The men in power squelching what is left of goodness and light in the world. As if on a mission to make sense of their own suffocating darkness. The men without power, tired of feeling dead inside, killing innocent humans. If the world looks like I feel, then maybe I'm not crazy.

More than anything, I think we all want to feel sane. To feel that what we are experiencing does not cut us off from the reality in which we are all trying to belong. The reality that acknowledges gravity as a fact. The reality that agrees we need air to breathe, blood to live. The reality that is capable of holding infinite truths whether or not our human minds can match that capacity.

The men I have loved were so different. Yet so much the same. They were all so skilled at masking their pain. The men I have loved scared me with how well they knew themselves and yet so often chose to forget. We can only hide for so long. And the better we are at hiding, the more violent the reveal. No one ever laid a hand on me, but they hurt me just the same. I kept loving them well past the point it was good for me, because I hoped so deeply to heal them. If I could heal one, maybe there was hope for us all.

It is so difficult for me to write this. Attempting to tackle the mountain that is male violence only to discover that a mountain is only the part you can see. How do we begin with what lies underneath? Millions of years of liquid heat hardening to rock. Unknowable depths. Can we possibly go that deep? Male violence, which I have come to understand is never so simple as testosterone fueled biological urges. It is layer upon layer of frustration, trauma, and shame. It is a seemingly endless legacy of repressed emotion, unacknowledged pain, and misunderstood suffering. It is the lineage of affliction passed on and dealt with in bloodshed. Repeatedly teaching the lesson that the only way to bear the injury is to injure another. Boys learning to stand their tenderness by toughening up. Men glorifying violence as a way of enduring the violence of the world. Those who wound, themselves being so deeply wounded.

I must give voice to what I have myself hidden from. I am ashamed that I let you abuse me. I know you didn't want to. But I kept showing up to remind you of your pain. I felt the world judging me as I judged myself. Why couldn't I leave? Why wasn't I strong enough to stand up to your rage? Because fear is a powerful drug. But hope is an even more powerful one. It became hard to tell which one I was high on.

It’s ok to love yourself into an oblivion, just promise you’ll return to what has always been there. What is always waiting for your care and attention. The will of your heart to rest in a soft safe place that doesn’t require something someone isn’t willing or able to give. Quit looking for what isn’t being offered. Find someone who says, “Here, I want to give you this. This doesn’t have to be a war. Here. This is what I offer without hesitation, without contempt, without pain. The only pain is keeping this from you.”

Find someone who is available. Find someone who is stable. Find someone who is not a child. Find someone who is not an asshole. Find someone who will not panic and leave. Find someone who wants it too. Find someone who will hold your hand and smile while you pee on the stick and will cheer with tears in their eyes when 2 pink lines appear announcing your sealed future. Together. Someone who is looking for togetherness. Maybe not even foreverness, which now seems more like a pipe dream, but someone who isn’t looking to flee. Someone who is wanting to stay. Someone who doesn’t talk about pregnancy as something that ruins the female body.

Someone who is real.

Someone who exists in real time. Someone who shows up. Someone who doesn’t want to be elsewhere. Someone who understands that it has taken a lot of work to get where you are and sees you for your bravery at not having given up yet. Someone who is secure enough in their own bravery to celebrate yours. Someone who wants to find out what comes next when you decide to commit to finding out together. Someone who takes responsibility for their shit and knows that it’s perfectly normal to have said shit. That no one makes it through this trying life without their fair amount of shit. Someone who doesn’t pretend it’s not there. Someone who is honest. Someone who doesn’t smear their shit all over your face and tell you you stink. Someone who forgives you for your shit. Someone who is open to talking about their shit and your shit willingly so through acknowledgement you can both help each other in your individual journeys towards continued healing.

FIND THIS! FIND THIS BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!

...

Breathe.

It’s okay.

Breathe.

Inhale the part of you that knows. Exhale the part that doubts.

Keep breathing.

Let your breath lead you to the part of you that knows, no matter what, your life has meaning. Even when you are struggling with the feeling that where you’ve landed is painfully off the mark from where you’ve been aiming all these years. Trust the genius that hugs the curves of the question marks. Your lack of grasp is not proof of something missing. It’s simply your station as a human signed up for the mystery of living. The implicit unknowing that comes with the job. All around you you see what you perceive as people who have figured it out. People who know all the need-to-be-known things. They have shiny cars and beautiful houses. They have savings accounts and health insurance. They go to the dentist every 6 months. They smile more and cry less.

You may even appear more like one of them one day soon. It may not be impossible to get there yourself. Carving out some sense of structure and security for your floating spinning life. And yet, at night, when the world is quiet and the silence has the space to be heard, you will remember in subtlety what is now deafening. Uncertainty is the only certain thing. Lean in. Keep wanting. Keep surrendering. Keep desiring. Keep seeking. Keep curling up in the curves of the question mark. Find your home there. Find your meaning in finding out as you go. Find your strength in the quiet victory of no longer pretending. And then...

Find yourself. Fight fiercely to hold onto her once you have. Defend her needs. Speak her truth. Love her throughout all her rovings and ramblings. Do not abandon her. Trust her. Believe her. Follow her feelings like a flashlight in the night. She is leading you where you want to go. Even through the dark and scary places. Know that she is leading you where you need to go. She knows. She knows. She knows. Each day, give yourself permission to stop doubting that a little more. Each day, give yourself permission to believe in your own unique and sacred mission a little more. Maybe one day the doubt will barely be a whisper hard to hear next to all the triumphant trumpets announcing the truth. You know. You know. You know. And you keep going.

Long. Awkward. Silence. . . Laughter. Communicating logistics and obstacles, hopes and fears, and the need for a bathroom break. Winding up and breaking down. Being witness to all the emotion that only motion can draw out.

Travel shows us who we are, what we value, and what we long for. Traveling with others can strip away the excess, the niceties, the added padding we put on so many of our proclamations. The open road and confined spaces have a special way of exposing still-tender wounds and forgotten scars. Old memories are remembered as new ones are being made. No adventure comes without its fair share of heartache. No journey is complete without surrendering what was for what is becoming.

When I set out on this epic adventure, I knew I was heading into unknown territory. Not geographically speaking. I had been to pretty much every place we had mapped out for our grand loop through the Western United States. I knew I was about to head into an as yet uncharted territory of my heart. I was going to venture into the mysterious terrain of shared space with a 39-year-old man and his 8-year-old son. I knew I would not return to my home the same. I knew we would all come back with lessons and opinions and feelings that would remain long after the car was parked back where it began. For better or worse...

The last 15 minutes of our long journey ended with us all in laughter, delighting in a shared joke. This is important. There was plenty of time on this trip when I thought I couldn't go another mile drowning in the annoyance, or the isolation, or the silence. There were days when I looked at them and thought how strange it was to find myself an intruder in their well established belonging to each other. And then there was the night on Orcas Island, when the 3 of us curled into our sleeping bags in our shared tent, giggling and breathing together, still learning each other, but silently aware that we were slipping into something familiar, something familial. A new kind of family. Something that is complicated but powerful in its realness. Something that takes a lot of time, patience, creativity, surrender, forgiveness, flexibility, humor, and ultimately love to grow. Something that will require newer and truer parts of you to come forth. Hopefully the bigger and better parts, but most likely something in between.

When you realize what you want, you might be surprised to find it looks nothing like what you thought it would. I never thought I would fall for a man with a child that wasn't my own. I never thought I'd need to learn the tricky territory of loving and leaving space with someone that you know will never see you as their mother, and yet, will hopefully overtime see you as an important source of love and support in their life. I never thought I'd be sitting in the passenger seat reading the I Survived series out loud to an enthusiastic boy in the backseat. At first rolling my eyes at the juvenile language and then being moved to tears. The simple language of the stories of sinking ships and shark attacks drawing out how complicated love can feel. How hard it is to stay open and soft when we’re all scared of being hurt. I never thought I'd feel the tender and complex love for a mother who was navigating her own feelings as she had to accept her child was growing to feel comfortable with another woman.

It's scary. I don't want to overstep any boundaries. I don't want to do more than is wanted or welcome. I don't want to threaten anyone, or take away. But I do want to honor the truth of who I am. I want to be allowed to love more each day. To impart wisdom or guidance where it is needed. When possible, to make life a little lighter, more beautiful, more secure. To honor the wishes of my partner, who is a wonderful father, while also believing that I have something to offer. Some new ways of seeing, of being. Some new ways of being good to and for each other.

On the road, we were stuck with each other, quite literally. Perhaps that is what raises the stakes. This movie trailer for what is your unfolding life. The road that stretches ahead becoming a metaphor for the bigger commitment you are making to each other. The ways you are forced to depend and negotiate and compromise. The way you have to stay in the tent in the middle of the night in Montana, no matter how much part of you may want to run away. The way you fall asleep hurt and wake to feeling another's breath on your face. The way it softens your desire to leave and imparts in you a primal need to stay.

I couldn't have known how 2 weeks on the road would make me feel. That's why I was nervous the morning we set out. That's why I stayed nervous, when we went to Portland to stay with his his ex-girlfriend, his first love, his now dear friend. But she was lovely, and the more I challenged myself to keep my heart open, the better it felt. And then visiting my family in North Idaho. Worrying how it would go. Melting into a puddle when it went so much better than I could have hoped. Feeling almost confused at how immediately comfortable it felt. How everyone settled into each other. How in the midst of my history, I could see a future unfolding, and how right that felt.

We have the measure of days and miles that we traveled, but there is no way to quantify what was gained. What was surrendered. What memories etched their way into our minds and how differently those memories will be remembered in future moments of our lives, together or apart. For now I am trying to keep it simple. For now I am trying to gratefully and graciously take my time. Offer what I have and who I am. Try not to ask for more than is gratefully and graciously given. And to trust that we come into each other's lives for a reason. And if we meet with open hearts and open minds, wherever the road may take us, we will discover more truth and love and beauty along the way. And if that's not the point to all of this, then I don't really know what is.

Do sheep ever itch in their own wool? I wonder this sometimes when I am squirming in my own skin. We struggle so to feel comfortable in ourselves, constantly bombarded with purchasable upgrades to our inadequate selves, our flawed forms. We are encouraged to keep track of where we lack and overlook the richness our lives already contain. Enmeshed in a culture that normalizes the telling of half-truths and the maintenance of big lies, we are tricked into feeling small while the deeper parts of us keep chanting: “But we are HUGE!” We are taught to put all that is infinite into cute, easily definable, easily digestible, homogenous boxes of consumption. Be less like the ocean and more like a lovable human juice box. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try online dating for 15 minutes and you’ll soon find out. A whole human heart and life and experience reduced to 4 photos, 3 sentences—an attempt at seeming desirable, do-able, reduce-able. We want to be able to reduce the abyss so we can be brave enough to face it.

Over the past couple of years, I have tried in my own ways to fit into the online dating landscape. And yet I could always feel the buzzing, flashing, flickering of my neon sign: “What in the hell am I doing here?!” But there I was alone at night looking for someone to take interest in my 4 photos, my 3 sentences. I came up against a lot of dead ends. I played with the amount of realness I could "get away with," as if being real is a punishable crime. As if adding money to a bank could land you in jail. And while I can't know the reasons why, I suspect that the great deal of non-responses I received to my honest dialogue was the result of being “too real."

Why are we so uncomfortable with meeting people as they actually are? Is it because we might then be expected, or possibly compelled to be as we actually are? Here's what my 3 sentences did not say on my profile: "I want next level love. My farts smell. I am hoping to get married and make babies in the near future." I was trying to figure out what amount of me was acceptable, what percentage was allowable. What version of me would be rewarded with a response, and possibly a cocktail or two.

I, like anyone, long to belong. But this type of trying begs the question: what’s the point if you stop belonging to yourself? The agonizing itch of pulling the wool over your own, or anyone else’s eyes, because you fear your nakedness will be deemed offensive, repellant? The abandonment of what is for the hope of what could be, when simply being is the whole goal no matter how often we forget to remember this. The truth shall set you free, or on fire. Whichever comes first. Just ask the witches.

I am a highly sensitive, intensely feeling person and my whole life I have heard the message that stoicism wins; that cold, calculated reasoning succeeds; that emotions are something to be contained, compartmentalized, concealed, and ultimately overcome. Here’s the deal: you do not overcome emotions. You can either feel them, move through them, understand and learn from them as you come out on the other side. Or, you can bottle them up and they will make you sick. They will make you mean. They will make you suffer worse than feeling them ever could. Sure, perhaps it is a more manageable, more subtle and slow form of suffering. But it is suffering nonetheless. It is a suffering that will disconnect you from life so effectively that you won’t even notice. You’ll just flip a lot of people off when you drive and get really uncomfortable when people have the nerve to cry.

What if we started feeling okay with feeling? What if we stopped putting periods on each other's run-on sentence realness? What if we stopped imposing our own punctuation on each other's meaning, the mutable grammar of feeling, the embracing of our underlying and intrinsic hunger for the truth? Our hungry hungry hearts are malnourished.

I have spent so much of my life feeling unlovable and highly leaveable because of the depth of my feeling. I do not say this in self-pity. I say this as a battle cry of acknowledgment. I have felt that I feel too much to be someone that could get another to stay. I am losing interest in feeling that way. I am tired of measuring myself against some unspoken volume of acceptable emotion, some agreed upon allowable depth. I am here to feel. I am here to dive. If my thirst is too deep, then go to the shallow end of the pool. But don’t make me feel bad for being endlessly curious about what undiscovered life is dancing down below. You don't roll your eyes or hide from the biographies of Jacques Cousteau.

I’m just trying like anyone else to figure out how to navigate this eternal floating-falling-seeking-searching-feeling we reductively call “living”. Some days are easier than others. Some days feel so hard that I can only manage to curl into a ball and bawl—a bawling ball of life. A fetal curl of feeling the weight of it ALL. Sometimes I feel like I am crying for everyone and everything and all time. NBD. Sometimes I feel I am crying my grandmother’s tears, my grandmother’s grandmother’s tears. Sometimes I feel like I am crying for all the lost loves who couldn’t stay and couldn’t cry for the loss of me. Yes, I am a woman who may force you to face, to feel; but who, if you let her, will create a crack that allows light to shoot out and shine in. Yes, I am a woman who will love you so fiercely you’ll learn new meanings for the word. Here’s the thing about feeling a lot: it works both ways. My pain is the deepest of reds, but my joy is the brightest of yellows. My hurt may hurt your heart, but my laughter will regenerate cells and cure cancer. Feeling is healing.

Over time, I have been learning how to stop making myself small and to stop apologizing for doing the very thing I know I was put on this earth to do. I spent years subconsciously looking for people and relationships to confirm my deepest fears and doubts—that I am too hard to love, too much to maintain. I am not too much. I am me-the size, the depth, the volume-that I am. I am as lovable and as leaveable as anyone. We all are. If someone cannot stay, it is not because I have failed, it is not because I don’t know how to be the right size. It is because the lessons we offer each other are ones that come with eventual conclusions. Beginning is but one type of education. Staying is another. Walking away, a no less revelatory experience, on either side. I have been on both sides. I have more compassion because of this. If you have never been left, I hope one day you will be, not because I am cruel, but because unknowing is its own form of cruelty and I hope for you to be kind, to learn how to stop hurting others by learning how awful it feels.

A few months ago, I deleted the dating apps from my phone over feeling the futile frustration of it all. Too many dead ends. And sure, fear still sitting at the head of the table. Unsure if I was able to show up as my "better self" and not just the weary lady who'd been rolling my huge busted ass suitcase full of pain all over creation. Showing up sweaty and weird looking. Flinching when anyone reached for something in my vicinity. Afraid of getting it wrong again. Falling on my face instead of in love.

But then, one night, out of a soft and uncomplicated mixture of boredom and curiosity, I downloaded Bumble again just to have something to do. To ponder and wonder at the mystery of not knowing what was next… In bed, alone, sleepy face illuminated by the screen, I scrolled with no expectations. I roamed in the rare freedom of desiring nothing in the process of looking.

And then, a match. A message sent. A response. A conversation budding from the bulb of never fully giving up hope—a hope that is constantly redefining both its parameters and its target. My hope has worn different faces, held different courts, sought different cures for morphing wounds. Perhaps inspirational posters have rendered the word cheap, but for me, hope is a highly valuable currency. Hope is simply a determination to keep going. To keep finding out how to live within the eternal state of unknowing. It’s the counter spell for the intoxicating effects of doubt. It doesn’t mean you know anything. It means you are dedicated to the process of wondering from an elevated plane, even if that means having to daily, hourly, climb out of the bog of 'What Is, Is Never Enough.' What is, is all there is. What if that is enough?

What am I afraid of? Feeling feelings that hurt? Is it really so simple? All these efforts we make to protect and then possibly miss out in the avoiding. How to not paint this present person the color of the past. To leave life and my mind and my heart open to learning new shades of blue. To trust that I can handle any and all future revelations. To trust. If I can't trust myself, then I am lost. To trust. I am getting there. Everyday I wake and try the best I am able. That amount varies as the light varies, as the sea changes, as the trees blossom and then drip decay onto the sidewalk. My best is what I am able. Everyday is a practice in celebration and forgiveness. Everyday I keep trying, and for that I am gifted the glory of my unfolding life. All I have to do is keep going.

This match. He is a man, a human as huge and complex as the stars. Over these past few months, his 4 photos, his 3 sentences have been replaced with the vast and unknowable sea of his human mind, his human heart. I am honored to be sitting at the shore, watching dolphins jump out, squealing with delight every time a humpback whale spouts. I am trying to be patient with the pacing of what is revealed to me. To be spacious in my anticipation. To show up simply as the shore containing my own ocean. Perhaps this time I will be able to hold that knowing, find ease in my capacity to encompass. Enjoy the simple life-giving force of being kissed by the body of another’s water. Not feeling empty at low-tide knowing the promise of high-tide, his or my own. Knowing it's all just life happening, eternally grateful for the education. Trying my best through it all to stay with what is true, I am exactly the right amount of me.

***

I am now offering intuitive counseling sessions over the phone. If you would like support in connecting with the right amount of yourself, please email me. Click here for more info.

I once went on a date with Ryan Gosling. He looked deeply into my eyes a lot and opened doors for me and told me I had nice legs, not once, but twice. And while that 7 hours that sparkled of Nicholas Sparks romance did render me helpless to hoping for more in the days that followed, I suspect that I was simply the recipient of a well practiced performance. A butterfly fluttering, heartbeat racing, future wedding plan making level of performance yes, but artifice nonetheless. A studio lot colosseum with nothing behind it. The jaw drop awe of standing before something magnificent only to enter and realize it’s just the front for an empty nothing. I am not saying that Mr. Gosling is not possessing of depth or quality, I am simply saying that what he gave me that night was his desire to impress, not the presence of who he truly was underneath what I imagine was an overwhelming need to meet the expectations of his then rapidly growing audience of wide-eyed women.

I will admit I was guilty of being such a woman, I will admit that I lost myself to the idea of a man that could pick me up over his shoulders to kiss me in the pouring rain. I will admit to the cliché of ordering a salad and barely being able to eat it because my stomach was too busy containing the collision of fantasy and reality. I suspect that Ryan knew what was expected of him that night as he calmly ate a bloody steak. And at the end of what had been a "perfect" date full of sexy heroism and countless camera worthy moments, I was left feeling like something very important had been missing. I felt overwhelmed with the desire to go to Ryan's childhood basement donning sweatpants and floppy socks and dancing to Stevie Wonder with underwear on our heads. I was left wanting for the truth of who we were, not the well executed exchange of boy meets girl, boy pretends to be brave, gift pretends to be small. We are all brave and all small in equal measure, expressed in different ways at different moments depending on how safe we feel in different spaces. I think we would all be amazed at what the world would look like if more people felt safe.

But I imagine that Ryan didn't feel safe being hopelessly human that night, too many eyes watching, too many projected hopes playing dreams across his perfectly sculpted chest. You have to be careful with those who are so afraid of failing expectations that they learn how to pretend to be everything you want them to be and forget who they actually are. That cannot and will not last. No one is everything and the truth never tires of finding its way to the light—even against our better efforts. So eventually the pretender will start to resent you once they realize they are tired of pretending. And you will realize you were in love with an idea, and that person that once felt so intimately known will now be a stranger.

Forgive yourself for believing in something that was never really there. We were taught to hope for impossible things.

Here is something I am starting to accept, that being let down by another is just one of the potential outcomes of stepping outside of ourselves. Perhaps this doesn’t have to be such a tragic or terrifying thing. Perhaps it could be seen as heartening, empowering even. I would rather be let down by another than love someone who continually lets themselves down. Loyalty is an empty offering when the giver is unloyal to themselves. This is something I have been learning in time. I must first honor what I need, not because I am selfish or self-centered to a fault, but because I understand that action beyond that truth becomes a lie. The trust that comes from loving someone who trusts themselves.

So what does this mean for partnership? This is a question I have been rolling around in my noggin a lot lately. That jagged rock is getting smoother over time. We have been fed this impossible narrative, that a solid relationship is built on unfailing love and unwavering dedication to the other, when in fact most people I know have been unfaithful in one way or another to their partner at some point. Good people, people I love and respect. I don’t think this is because we are all inherently shitty people, I think it’s because relationships tend to become so convoluted and consuming that we forget how to be faithful to ourselves.

We are not stones, we are fluid moving feeling beings changing and evolving, shifting, unfixed, and yet we expect each other to deny our very nature in the name of "love". No, love is loving the truth of who we are and bravely sharing that truth with each other as we constantly reimagine what we are endlessly becoming. Love is spacious and undulating. Love is an improvised dance, a long walk in a pathless field. Love is where freedom and belonging meet. Our polarized culture, our polarized brains really struggle with this. This is where the wisdom of the heart must enter and overrule our programming to divide and conquer. This is where we are invited to stretch our capacity to hold space for all the things we were taught must rule the other out. Night does not render the day untrue, it allows us to feel the morning, to understand what it means to be loved by the sun. And even in the daylight, we understand that the moon still loves us too.

Love doesn’t mean escaping unscathed. Love means having the capacity to leave room for the truth, and finding the desire to forgive, ourselves as much as others. I have spent 20 years of my life living for the fairytales I was told as a little girl. And now as a woman, I am learning from the deficit of that miseducation. I don’t want a perfect partner (which doesn't exist), a want an honest partner (which I hope exists). I want a partner that is so grounded in the knowing of who they are that living that truth stops being optional. Even if that means one day they look me in the eyes and say, “I no longer want this life with you.” Would I be stoked? No. Would I puke and cry for some time? Probably. But I swear that I would rather that than share a bed next to someone living an entirely different truth in their head from the one they feel able to communicate with me.

Do I ask too much? Perhaps. But I am left wanting from all the years of asking too little.

Sometimes I threaten a life of non-religious nunnery. Donning a habit to escape the agonizing habit of hoping for a man to surprise me. I’m not talking about the surprise of realizing they are not at all who they claimed to be. I’m not talking about the surprise that they will not stand by your side when you are the most in need. Surprise! You’re going to have to go through this pregnancy loss alone…

I am talking about the surprise of sharing my ideas, the unapologetic truth of who I am, and a man smiling and saying, “Yes, tell me more.” Dudes, please stop hiding. Please stop being afraid of a woman unafraid. Please stop avoiding, denying, pretending, and lying. I know it’s hard. I know you are simply doing as you were taught, just as I am learning how to wake myself from the curse, to free myself from the coma of being taught to silently wait for a man to kiss me back to life. I will not be silent, I will not live this life in waiting. I will stop shrinking and serving and start sanely asking, "What are you bringing to the table? What do you have to add to this feast I have prepared?"

This is not man hating, this is woman loving. This is not about dating, this is about humanity. Where has our humanity gone?

To be clear, I LOVE men. I really do. I think men are wonderful, but I ache for us to find a way to heal the long-neglected wounds that have been passed on for generations of men being told not to feel, not to cry, not to acknowledge the hurt, the pain and trauma of watching those they love die, of killing, of normalizing violence and abandoning the heart. Men, it is not your fault, you have been doing what was expected and demanded of you, but you are the ones who must start claiming your healing. Let a woman teach you how, let us heal each other...

Who wants to start a new app with me? It would be called “Tender” to replace the inhumanity of Tinder. A dating app where we say what we mean and reveal who we are. Where we have the courage and compassion to acknowledge how deeply vulnerable a thing it is to long for connection.

Tell me how life has wounded you and I will show you my scars. I am tired of pretending.

I am not writing this in hopes of finding "my man". I no longer believe there is someone I am meant to claim. I am writing this to surrender that notion altogether. Not because I no longer believe in or hope for partnership, but because I am tired of disconnecting from myself and my truth in my better attempts at union. I am learning how to stay with myself as I invite the company of another. I was not taught how to do this. I must teach myself. That is what I have been doing all these years. All the endings have not been failings, they have been graduations. I am not ashamed of my misguided attempts, I am proud of my will to keep trying, to keep sharing, to keep loving, despite what has often lead me to a broken brain and a desecrated heart.

I am weary, yes, but not defeated. A friend recently told me that as he’s watched me over the years—in all my efforts to love, in all my heartbreak and joy and excitement and frustration—he is left with the impression that I am unsinkable. I cried when he said this. I felt the ocean stretched out before me, met by my determination to keep going, to keep plunging the depths in search of what electric life lives below. To stay courageous and curious as I dive into the big blue wonder of learning how to love myself and others. And to remember always to come up for air, face pointed up towards the warmth and the light of the sun. The gift of another day, another chance to move closer to the center of who we are in love with ourselves and each other.

Pretending someone is dead when you know where they live. It's 5am and that part of your brain that wakes you up when you are tired and need sleep is telling you to drive to their house and make sure they're still breathing.

They are still breathing, stay in bed and breath. S L O W, D E E P, nourishing breaths. Think of your breath as a ham sandwich or a rich meaty stew, or a macrobiotic bowl if that's more your speed, whatever it is that is nourishing to you. Drink it in like holy water. This breath is holy, it keeps you alive and if you do it with presence, it keeps you sane.

Sanity is the goal. Even when it feels insane that someone could in one lifetime say the things you have been waiting, praying, longing to hear for several lifetimes, and then, with what appears like relative ease, disappear silently from your life. Sometimes pretending he doesn't exist anymore is the only thing that makes that feel ok, the only thing that makes it make sense. Or there's always the possibility that he fell down a mountain and is trapped under a rock? (Yes, I have managed in moments to convince myself of this). Perhaps that is why he hasn't responded to your open hearted and deeply vulnerable text? You must go find him and save him!.. No, Bethany, stay. Stay and save yourself.

He does exist and in your better moments, when you are laughing with your friends and manage to forget that you feel abandoned by love, and realize you can never be abandoned by love. (Love is always there loving, it's just that sometimes we abandon love in our doubting). You realize how glad you are that he still exists, even if you don't get the proof of his smiling eyes on your face. You delight in knowing he walks the earth and smiles at new faces and maybe is even smashing his smiling face up against the smiling face of another. And in your best moments, you hope that he is. Because loving someone is hoping that they're getting their smiling face smashed up against the smiling face of another. And you do love him. But more than that, you love yourself. And you hope for your own smiling face smash. And you're not an asshole. You're not a hypocrite. You are a really loving person who is just learning how to smile despite this heightened awareness of the tenderness of your heart.

You wonder if that tenderness is a turn off. You wonder if men will always run away. And then you remember that meat stew breath and you start spooning it in. You spoon yourself in breath. You are the little spoon to your big spoon breathing. You put your right hand on your belly and your left hand on your heart. You become your own holding. You close your eyes and say, "I love you. I know it hurts, but I also know it won't hurt for much longer and you're doing so well despite your pain. And I also know that this pain will be mirrored with pleasure when pleasure is ready to offer her glory. In the meantime, accept that sometimes you wake up and want to drive to his house just to remember how it feels to be held." No, Bethany, stay. Stay and hold yourself. And then get up and write.

Write. Take walks. Drink tea. Do yoga. Read books. Watch movies. Talk ad nauseam with your more patient friends. Look at the sky. Stare at the wall. Place your feet firmly on the ground. Buy that fifteen dollar chunk of malachite because it is beautiful and green and looks ancient and sturdy and the woman in the shop in Ojai said it will protect you and you believe her. Do all the things that feel right. Your mind is a motherfucker right now trying to tear shit up. You have to rely on that vigilant ally beating in your chest, sending you morse code of the truth. Here's what is true:

You are lovable. You are not too much. You did the best you could with what you had. You are always learning, growing, getting better. You deserve all the things you hope for yourself. No one is to blame for what didn't work. Just because someone who once wanted to smash their smiling face against your smiling face no longer wishes to and might wish to smash it against a new one doesn't mean there is anything wrong with your face. You are not meant to convince someone to love you. You are meant to be who you are centered in your own love, welcoming of someone if they'd like to join that party. If at any point the party dies and it is time for you to go home to your own respective homes and fall asleep alone, know that you are never really alone. You alone are everything, everything you need is living in that cave full of jewels known as your heart. Please be a loving miner.

Please find your way back to these truths, no matter how many times a day your monkey mind lures you to stray. Return, dear one, to the truth. Choose wisely the people and places you surround yourself with. Make sure they help you return as well. Guard vigilantly the honest home of your heart. Perhaps even take a class from an herbalist named Rachel and learn about some heart opening and boundary strengthening plants you can take to aid in this task (rose, rosemary, wolfberry, ocotillo bark, yarrow, lemon balm)...

The heart is the organ of perception. It senses and produces electromagnetic waves and therefore picks up information before the brain is able to start doing its thing. In order to keep the heart open to receive all this vital information, it is crucial that we establish and maintain protective boundaries. Boundaries are permeable and not to be confused with barriers which are fixed and impenetrable. Boundaries are the place we create where we give ourselves the choice between saying, yes or no. It is the threshold we maintain for the experience we are going to have, or not have. We are the gatekeepers of our space. We have a choice of what we let in. What we let go. What we lovingly are able to tell "no". Aaaaand, what we can lovingly tell YES.

Every man I have every loved knocked at that gate. They are not to blame for what I allowed to enter. But look at me now, see me coming into my power. Know that if you knock, I will make sure first that there is space for you in my sacred tower. I am losing interest in crowding out the truth of my heart with the broken wings and neglected needs of another. I am not calloused, I am wisely tender. I will only give what remains of my own feeding. I will do this because I am learning how to love. I know that love does not flow from an empty body. I must not neglect my own hunger. My fullness is my gift, to myself, and to everyone I invite to join me at the table. I do not regret any of the love I have given, I only regret the love I failed to give myself. I am learning how to not regret. I am learning when to walk away and when to stay, open up, and say, "Please, come in". I am the gatekeeper.

When you're letting go of someone you love, the world is full of sharp corners. My body is a bruise for you. I am wounded by the absence of your touch.

Did I imagine it all? Or did we really once see the same forever, sunlit and windblown winding our way to the ocean?

Time has been decapitated and strangely punctuated. Time has been blunted but also stretched waaaaaay out. The distance to tomorrow might as well be forever. In time this will all just be a memory. Only time will heal these wounds. I remember the feeling like I had nothing but time. I don’t feel that way anymore.

It's pretty incredible to me the things I find in my internet searching for truth. The perfectly timed scientific discoveries that confirm what I am in that moment proving in my own body. I recently read that the feeling of not being accepted is experienced as physical pain equivalent to having a broken leg. A broken heart actually feels like a broken heart. It hurts. Sometimes it feels like my chest is going to break. When we break a bone, we go to the doctor and they take x-rays to confirm the fracture. Then they set it and wrap it in plaster so it can heal. A straightforward process for ending the pain. I can’t stop imagining that you have the plaster for my heart.

I know that you don’t. I know that my healing begins the moment I stop hoping you will heal me.

When you miss someone, everything is covered in their name. Like little labels stuck to objects that are now tragic little shrines. The knife now reminds you of that one night he cried cutting onions. You wondered if it was really the onions. The corner of Lincoln and Ventura now reminds you of where you once turned right. Now you keep going. You drive straight, headed towards your healing. What was once right has ceased to be so. You must choose a new direction, even if all of you wants to turn that wheel. Keep going straight towards your healing.

How to accept. How to move forward. How to move on. The world isn’t ending, even if it feels that way. The dissolution. The disillusion. The breaking up of what you had thought (hoped) was unbreakable. Tonight I will fill the last empty boxes of the life we had started together. I am going to store those boxes in my friend’s garage. I am going to do my best to let go of the future that once lived so vividly in my mind. That future has died. Mourn its loss as you learn how to let it go.

Stay above, but know the depth. All these notes to self I jot down. This eternal archeology of the heart. This faithful dig. A collection of ancient artifacts slowly unearthed. What story has already been told? Whose story are you living? What new story is waiting for your telling? We repeat these painful patterns as many times as it takes to collect all these fractured and buried bones. We are trying to put ourselves back together. We are hoping for a clearer picture, a way to finally know what we are made of. Such a strange and ineffable longing to return to some distant memory of self while being inexplicably driven towards building something new, something better, something less tangled in past lives.

I wake in the middle of the night and grab my notebook to write something down. In between two worlds, neither here nor there. I read it in the morning. We're going to have a star named after us after this is all over, right?

I once heard a scientist say we are all dead stars looking up at the sky. Our home, always right there, or impossibly far away. Depends on how you look at it. I am trying to close the distance. I am trying to find that feeling. With you I felt like the sky had returned to me. In you I found a home.

The rain like a thousand tiny intruders wakes me in the middle of the night. I am afraid. I am alone with my longing. Longing to have him by my side. His love and protection are something I hadn’t let myself feel before. Having to let him go feels like learning how to feel safe all over again.

You are safe. Tell yourself that as many times as you need. 384 times a day. As many times as it takes until you believe it. Until you can feel it and breathe it. You are safe.

We used to joke that we were driving a race car. We were traveling so very fast. Only fools rush in, or perhaps just regular people who are curious and courageous enough to see what’s on the other side of this feeling. This feeling. Oh the feeling of falling in love. What a glorious falling. What a magnificent undoing. Coming undone is just one form of becoming. The pain that’s left when things fall apart is in direct contrast to the joy you once felt. This death is happening because you were once so fully alive. In love. You are stretching your capacity for the glory of it all. You are adding a new marble wing to your magnificent temple.

I am proud of my bravery in love. I wouldn’t take any of it back. I dove in. I learned the hard way. But here is what I am realizing: I am in the thick icky space of confronting the disappointing reality that I have spent most of my life waiting for a man to save me— waiting for someone to show me that I am worth saving. There. I said it. I admitted it, first to myself, and now to you. A feminist who has hoped that the end to her suffering would ride up on a white horse. A princess who forgot the transformative power of her own kiss. The knight in shining armor isn't coming. That man is a myth and in waiting for that illusion you have trapped yourself in a tower. You have been waiting for someone else to accept you so you could finally accept yourself. You are that someone else. You are your own salvation. You are the white horse. You are worth saving. You must save yourself.

***

At our beginning, he took me to the beach. His hair the sun. His eyes the sky. It was so clear that he was where he belonged. I stayed on the sand while he entered the water. I have always been afraid of the ocean.

Several months later, after our ending, a mystic told me that this was not the first time we had loved each other. We had shared 17 lifetimes together. In one of them I lost him to sea. He went out and never returned. I spent the remainder of those days in waiting, in mourning. In this lifetime I can feel that pain, that eternal agonizing hoping. That day in the beginning I nervously sat watching him, still a stranger. So new to me, yet powerfully familiar. Overwhelmed with feeling, I wrote this:

he loves the oceanand he’s not afraid of herdaily he surrenders to her waysdaily he navigatesher will, her power

I sit on the shore writinglooking up, watchingmaking sure he’s still there

the current carries him awaymakes him a black pinprickin the bluegray fabric

I keep writingpaying special mindnot to wait for his returnbut to wonder athis form upon the water

My heart is slowly healing with the plaster of time. I am finding strength in releasing. I held him in my sight just long enough to be moved. Just long enough to expand, to become wider, closer to my truth. And now to stop waiting for his return. Now to be grateful. Now to simply say, thank you. Thank you. You helped me understand the might and the depth of the ocean.

There is a void felt these days by women and men— who suspect that their feminine nature, like Persephone, has gone to hell. Wherever there is such a void, such a gap or wound agape, healing must be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It is another of the old alchemical truths that “no solution should be made except in its own blood.” So the female void cannot be cured by conjunction with the male, but rather by an internal conjunction, by an integration of its own parts, by a remembering or a putting back together of the mother-daughter body.

- Nor Hall

5 years ago, I had an abortion. I wanted to write about it then, but couldn’t. Not because I was ashamed, but because I was buried.

I am still digging myself out.

No one talks about what to expect after an abortion. And while I know that like anything, there are infinite ways it can be experienced, all equally valid and valuable, I want to share my experience. When I researched abortions back then, searching for understanding and comfort, what I found was an endless stream of fear mongering and hate speech. I want to be clear that despite my experience I do not regret making the decision and I am passionate about preserving the rights of women to make these decisions for themselves.

Becoming pregnant is the most leveling experience I have had. It is a mighty filter. EVERYTHING goes through it. What was left after that sifting was my becoming as a woman. I understand more now why thousands of years have been spent trying to keep us small and silent. We are HUGE. Our song is the very reminder of life and death, we are terrifying in our truth.

After my abortion, everything collapsed around me. Everything. I was a woman on fire. A building engulfed in flames. I burned and burned and burned until all that I was was burning, Until all that I was had turned to ash. I recently read that a phoenix sets themselves on fire. That’s how their transformation begins, the striking of the match in their own hands.

After I emerged, I weighed myself in a gas station bathroom in northern Nevada. One of those scales you put a quarter in in exchange for your weight. 112 pounds it told me. I went home to find an old 7th grade basketball photo of myself, the kind that printed your stats on the back. 112 pounds. 12 years old. The year I started my period. The year I sucked at basketball but played it because that's how you fit in. The year I resisted the insistence of my classmates that I kiss Jake at recess. The year I knew how to touch myself to find the potential joy that existed in the space that would remain private for a couple more years, until I would let the awkward hands of a boy try to find that joy.

So I had reduced myself to the size I was when all of this begin. The year I began bleeding. Possessing the potential to create life. The potential to hold death. I was just beginning to understand that I held a power. I felt it in the uneasiness I felt around grown men who started to notice I was becoming a woman. I noticed it when I stood naked before a mirror. I was forming into something dangerous, and I was scared. I started working out at the gym. I started lifting weights. They could try and have me, but I would find the strength to fight back. That is how I thought of it then. I needed to be strong enough to protect this thing inside of me.

After my abortion I was so frail. I had lost over 20 pounds in less than three weeks. I was barely able to sleep or eat. It still makes me feel sick to remember that time. That utter and complete dislocation from life. I was drowning in darkness. My slow quiet dying. But my undoing became my saving grace. My hipbones announced a state of emergency. Strangers offered to feed me, recognizing that need. I was starting over. Learning how to be a human again. How to sleep. How to eat. How to be me. I was awkward and unsure, but I was grateful that my body was saying what I could not. I was grateful for the sandwiches friends made me. I was grateful that people cared. That care is what cured me. That care was the light that helped me find myself again.

What followed was a patient and steady return to myself. I started doing the things I had always wanted to but never had. I started therapy. I began meditating. I reached out to friends for support. And slowly I reemerged. I started to enjoy the taste of food again. I started to dance when I heard music. I heard my laughter after what had been months and it brought tears of joy to my eyes. I was learning how to live again. Who says we are supposed to learn that only once in infancy? We are always just beginning to learn what is an eternally unfolding new world. My pain just made every cell of me aware of this process.

During this time, I didn’t have my period for months. An absence of blood. It is not lost on me, the months of praying for the red to signal it was all going to be ok, and now the months of praying for the red to stop. Perhaps I am now bleeding out that wound. I wasn’t able to then. I am now. Redemption in the blood. I have been bleeding for months. A reminder of the loss, this time one I did not will to happen— no less humbling, but its humility has new perimeters I am learning. the abortion happened to my body unconscious. I woke up hollowed out. This time I was a witness to every drop of blood. Every piece of that life that began and then ended. My wound is in the witnessing. My healing is in knowing now what I lost then.

Then I didn’t take the time to consider the pregnancy beyond something I needed to “fix” as soon as possible. A problem I needed to solve so the relationship I was in and desperate to preserve could remain intact. It didn’t work. The relationship ended, he left, and I was stranded. It wasn’t until almost exactly nine months later when I lay sobbing on the floor that I realized, I would have been having a child that week, and to my own astonishment and devastation, wished that I was. The void was my labor that day. I gave birth to an emptiness, an absence. I gave birth to a denial of my own body truth.

And this time, desperate to race the clock that was ticking so loudly I'd sometimes have to ask others to repeat what they were saying, so lost in the thought of what if? What if there isn’t enough time? What if it is already too late? What if I will never find the right one? What if I am not the right one? I got lost in the frantic wondering, I became pregnant too soon to even know what it meant. I joined heart body and mind with a stranger. It felt so right, but it was too soon to tell how having his DNA rearrange my very own would pan out.

Again, alone.

Alone with new DNA, new information. Part of that information is the agonizing full body feeling that I need him by my side. But why need a thing that is unable or unwilling? Why bear that pain, shocked awake in the still dark morning, suffocated by the silence and the space? What to do with the feeling that you have no other option but to want a thing you cannot have until one beautiful morning you wake and it’s light outside and you are free of this chest crushing ache. I made it there before. I will make it there again.

I have a dull pain on my lower left side. The space between my belly button and my left thigh. Draw a diagonal line between the two points. Find the spot halfway between. Right there. You found it. Some invisible finger is poking me there, as if trying to get my attention. As if wanting to ask a question. But I don’t have the answer. I close my eyes and wait. Eventually it will come, or, the pain will go away. Which will come first?

This body, this fierce messenger. Always telling me the things the discomfort of life makes me want to forget. The body doesn’t forget, it won’t let you, and I am grateful for that. I have struggled with this sensitive vessel for most of my life. It wasn’t until my 20’s when in one of my first yoga classes I realized my body wasn’t just some torture device I was forced to endure life in. I was bent backwards in bridge pose, tears of revelation streaming down my face. My body becoming the bridge. My body was me. I was my body. We could work together, not against one another. I could tend to it and in turn, it was always tending to me.

Pain is what gets me here, to this place, writing it all down in the dark. Unable to sleep, desperate to still my mind. Surrounded by books meant to illuminate and sooth. Surrounded by magical stones meant to heal and invite spiritual truth. Surrounded with friends and family all on my side, all longing to help. And yet, I am the only way out. Through me is how I get to the other side of this hurt. I did this to myself. I hoped for something and had the courage to risk everything thinking I might get it. A family. A place where I could finally belong, truly belong, in blood.

Now I am bleeding and being daily reminded of what I lost, of what I hoped for. When even the doctors are mystified and can’t explain what is happening in your body, you know it isn’t something to be healed with surgery or pills. My heart is bleeding and it is coming out from between my thighs. The blood has to go somewhere. I started bleeding this red a long time ago. I am glad it is finally coming out. I will let it continue until I am emptied out, ready to be filled with something new, or perhaps just the space to feel what remains.

I feel let down, by men, some specific ones and then men in general. The men who have all gained access to my existential portal. The men who have gotten there with charm or promise of security. The men who have gotten there wearing white coats and stethoscopes. The men who were simply something other than nothing at the moment. The men who were lying and the men who were telling the truth. All of them, granted entrance to the deepest part of me. The part of me that hopes to feel pleasure and yet so often has felt excruciating pain.

Am I to forgive them all? Or need I only forgive myself? Did these men abandon me? Or did I simply abandon myself? I cry to write that. There’s the body again, giving me my answers. Tears are a message writing invisible lessons on the paper of your skin. Look in the mirror and read them. Learn about yourself. Your inner wound that only hopes to be healed with enough time and enough truth. Truth is the only thing that will cure a broken heart, even when it is truth that has broken it. Only with the blood of the wound can we heal.

All this blood I have spilled, gone, flushed down. Over and over and over again. Every time I go to the bathroom, or shower, or simply change my clothes. A forced confrontation. Something is in need of healing. I have no choice. Sometimes it gets so bad, the body gives you no choice.

This morning I googled "healing in the blood" and found my way to the bible story of "The Bleeding Woman". I watched some Youtube videos, all of men with southern accents talking about this woman who had suffered for 12 years. Bleeding (from where they do not say), but we know. Where else can a woman bleed from for 12 years without dying? This woman, weary and “unclean”, braved the crowd and snuck up behind Jesus, certain she would be healed if she could just touch him. She reached out and touched his robe, and instantly, the bleeding stopped. She was healed. But even Jesus, who instantly knew he had been touched, knew it wasn’t him that had healed her. Her courage, her determination to reach him, her faith in her healing, that is what healed her. She had healed herself. Being willing to brave the judgement of others. Being willing to make yourself level with those you worship. Being willing to believe that you deserve that healing. Knowing your one task is the journey towards wholeness, which is actually just a constant reminder that you are already there, no matter how much life may challenge you to remember. There's no quick fix or easy solution. There's only the willingness to love yourself enough to keep trying, to keep going. To continue reaching out for what you know will be your healing.

I was so scared to let him go. I knew letting go of him really meant letting go of me— the idea of what “me” had become. But I also knew it was the only chance I had of getting myself back. The me I had given up. Sometimes the only option left is to leave your home. He had been my home, “we” had been my home. And yet, I had abandoned the home of my heart and I knew I had to find my way back. I was homesick for myself. So I let it all go. I dove into the abyss. I began again. Unfettered and afraid, I went in search of what had been lost, in search of the life I had yet to give birth to.

I want children. I wanted children with him, but I had become a woman in waiting. I tried to be patient, I tried to be ok with the wait. But the body does not abide by the lies of the mind. My body is a clock and time is moving forward. I was holding myself back. So I left, feeling so afraid that I would not have enough time to find my way to that wished for future. I do not say that lightly. I feel the weight of my whole life in that sentence. But I knew I could not fight anymore what all of me knew, that despite that fear, I had to go, I had to release an idea and ride on the raw hope of finding out in time what no one could tell me. I had to go and find out for myself…

And here I am, across an ocean. Adrift in a sea of unknowing, I am trying to find grace in the floating. Some days I dance on air. Other days I am like a two-legged grizzly bear trying to climb a tree in a mall parking lot. Awkward. Confused. So very unsure of what I am doing. By the time you read this, I will be somewhere that at the moment of writing it, I do not yet know. I will be sleeping in a bed I have not yet met. I will be relying on the kindness of strangers, the credit of my master card. I will be carried by my devotion to possibility. Possibility, this is what keeps me going, this is my religion. The possibility of somehow figuring it out, finding a way, finding a home. This is what I ache for when I am exhausted from all the wandering and wondering. This is what I am grasping at sleepless in the dark— a conclusion, an end point, a familiar place of belonging. But the truth that has gotten me here is that I am more interested in unwrapping the mystery of each moment than figuring out where they are all leading. The choice I made was to surrender to uncertainty. It was a choice, a decision. My choice, my decision. I am having a love affair with the unknown.

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty. -Terry Tempest Williams

With him I had become silent, invisible. I lost my voice. I disappeared.

With my words, I give birth to myself. I am my own child. I am a newborn despite my age. Over three decades on earth, still naked and in need of care. I am learning to live on a different continent where every decision I make becomes a birth in and of itself. Each turn I take down an unfamiliar street. Each foreign word I need to speak. I long to communicate, but the words I once used no longer serve me so I must learn language all over again. What I say to you now has more weight because I do not say it carelessly. We can be so careless with a trained tongue. But when in learning anew how to give voice to our deepest fears and desires, every thing that comes out quivers with life and hopes desperately to be heard. Each sentence somehow begs the question, “Will I survive this?” This communication is its own kind of infancy in need of love and protection, in need of help being carried into life. Help me. I am asking. These are words I am just learning to speak.

I know that is why I push myself into these new worlds. I know that is why this is not the first time I have turned my life upside down. I know this will not be my last. I am teaching myself how to ask. I am learning to trust. To trust others, to trust life, and ultimately, to trust myself. With the wide eyes and innocent heart of a child, I begin. I ask for directions, for a place to rest, for answers to all of these new questions the unexpected presents. What I have known in the past does not serve me now. I must let go of what I once knew in order to make room for what is possible. This moment, this bursting seed, this aching blossom, it grows as I grow. Does the seed worry that the rains will not come? Do the flowers lose sleep doubting the daily ambrosia of the sun? Why should I doubt life’s promise to hold me while I am here, to carry me from one day to the next? I have made it so far. I am so proud of the distance. Baby steps with big feet. I start over, and I keep going. I stumble, I doubt. I ask for help. I am heard. With my words, I give birth to myself.

36 days, and I am still bleeding. I have never had such an intimate relationship with my own blood. Its various forms, colors, volumes, consistencies. I have seen every shade of red. For 24 years now, I have bled every 21-29 days. But nothing could prepare me for this. The amount. The endlessness of it. And the river of pain that carried it all out.

How do you write about something bigger than yourself? How do you write about an earthquake, the tectonic plates, the earth's liquid core full of fire? I was a volcano erupting. How do you describe pain without having to feel it again? I want to write about it but it hurts. The pain was an endless sea of burning hot sand stretching on for days on end. Everywhere I stepped, the heat. No relief. I am stripped bare from feeling parts of my body that can scream. A bone shaking scream, drowning everything else out. That night,I was reduced to the sound of my screaming.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. 12 weeks pregnant. I had 28 weeks to go. I was just starting to comprehend what it all meant. That I was surrendering to not knowing what it would all mean. I wrote this in my journal at 5 weeks, shortly after I took the pregnancy test:

So I'm pregnant, or so the 2 pink lines say I am. So do my swollen breasts, and my tender moods. So does the absence of blood between my thighs, and this steady nausea. I am pregnant. 5 weeks today. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I mean I feel so many things. And I also don't feel about it. Still slightly disconnected from the full weight of this truth. I imagine that it must just slowly spread over you, instead of one giant wash, so as not to drown in the volume of this new reality— too much to fathom all at once. To contain inside you something bigger than you— life, and conversely, death too— the mystery. To transition into becoming a gatekeeper. To be compelled to question everything now that nothing will ever be the same. It's not just you anymore. It'll never be again. No matter what becomes of this child, they will always live inside you, in the memory of your heart— containing a heartbeat. A heartbeat so close that wasn't your own and yet lived inside.

"No matter what becomes of this child." Reading that now, now that I am no longer pregnant, I am struck by my words almost spoken as a premonition. I understand. I think I was protecting myself. This is not the first time I have been pregnant. I have been pregnant 3 times. I have no children. The arithmetic of a broken heart. I wanted to be happy, to be excited about this pregnancy. It's what I've wanted for so long. But I know I was scared to trust it. I was scared to lose again. I don't remember writing this journal entry, I'm sure I was in a daze. A daze that remains. Only 5 weeks in, trying to wrap my brain around a new universe. The 7 weeks that followed are heavy with smoke. I see them through a haze. It hurts to remember. But I don't have a choice. My mind constantly finds its way to those days despite my better efforts.

As I'm writing this, a woman has just sat down next to me with her infant. It seems the world is now bursting with pregnant women and babies. I try not to take it personally. In a large room full of empty chairs, this woman sat next to me. She doesn't know what her miracle does to me. She isn't thinking of me or what I've been through. She is just trying to comfort her baby as he's crying. His tiny fingers are poking up out of the stroller playing an invisible piano. I am fighting tears watching his dancing hands. The night my miscarriage began, my fingernails dug holes into my palms. They too played an invisible piano while I wailed a song of lament, this isn't what I wanted.

I didn't know my body could feel such pain. I didn't know losing a child too soon could feel so violent. 6 years ago I had a miscarriage at 6 weeks and it came as a relief. 1 year after that, I had an abortion at 8 weeks. I am still actively healing from that wound. I made that impossible decision because I didn't feel I had another one to make. I didn't know that the emptiness I felt when I woke from the anesthesia would remain. I still feel it. Decisions like that, you can never know the anguish until you stand at that gate. Don't judge me, hug me. And then this time, this time was different. This is what I had been hoping for with all of my heart. And I believed my partner when he told me it was what he wanted too. So I was preparing myself to mother this child for the remainder of my days. I was rearranging the furniture in my chest. I was dusting off neglected shelves. I was drawing back the curtains to open windows I had locked tight.

I am telling you this because I wish someone would have told me. I am telling you this to put a human face on a vast and shared experience that all too often is buried in fear and shame or simply the discomfort of pushing past the sense that, "This is just not something you talk about". This is something we need to talk about. I hope more women can share their experience. I hope more men can share their experience too. I hope more people can understand how many (so many) women have walked this painful path. The journey to creating life is long and winding. Death is just part of creating life. It is not a failure. I repeat, it is not afailure. It is an agreement we make when we step out into this unknown territory. When we decide to open this portal. To let life come through us. Silently we understand, often without even knowing we do, that holding the potential of life means holding the potential of death too.

Through all of this, I am amazed by the human body. The female body specifically. Everything this anatomy is capable of and what it can endure. I was on all fours, making low moaning animal sounds, afraid my frame wouldn't be able to stand one more minute of the pain. And yet, it held together. I remained. At one point, exhausted from wrestling with the war that was waging inside, I realized my body was able to hold it all and to hold me in the process. I belong in here. I belong in me. I am where I am meant to be. Pain can teach us so much if we are willing to feel it.

How to get comfortable with discomfort. How to sit and not numb or hide or escape the pain. How to feel the pain instead—get to know its perimeters. Its shape. The waves it makes. How to get better at feeling bad. Who decided we should only hope to feel happy? Isn't every feeling worth feeling? What about just tending to the vessel, polishing your capacity for holding it all? What about not rushing to feel something different. Letting what you feel be ok too. The energy I spend judging what I'm feeling or hoping to feel otherwise is energy that could be used for accepting what I feel. Freeing up my ability to move through the feeling with presence and grace, Readying myself to feel something new in due time.

I am telling myself that that is what this is all about. Practice. e x p a n s i o n. Creating more space between what I experience and what I think I know. Sitting in the mystery that surrounds us despite our desperate attempts to come up with concrete answers to contain the sky. We don't know. These past few months have been a crash course in exactly how much I don't know. Apparently I thought I knew a lot, because I have really been given one holy dose of, Actually, you don't know shit. Thank you life for reminding me. Thank you life for giving me the opportunity to practice all the unpleasantries that make me better at living life as it actually is and not simply as I wish it would be. Thank you for taking me one plank closer to bridging that gap.

Life is not here to give me what I want. Life is here to show me who I am. What I am capable of. I have to be patient with that process so as not to be miserable for the duration of my days. Sometimes I cry for myself. For all the wantings and have-nots that are crowding my mind with their pointy little elbows. And sometimes I smile, a big fat face changing sort of smile, thinking of what I do have, mostly in the form of family, friendship, love and support. Wow. Just wow. So much love and support. So much compassion. So much patience. So much empathy, generosity, and humor. I am rich in human kindness. And in this world full of hurt, I know my pain is small. But I believe that what is true in small scale so too can be true at large. Humans do not want to see each other suffering. Humans want to help heal these wounds. When life falls apart, it can be an opportunity for seeing how many people you're surrounded with who want to help you build it back up. Better and stronger not in spite of, but because of the break down.

I am writing this through a fine layer of ash. Los Angeles is burning. The sky has psoriasis. Flaky white hot snow. The falling ghosts of burning brush. It feels oppressive. I long to be elsewhere. I long for a cool breeze. For tall trees. I have an image in my head of a coniferous embrace, face pressed against the bark of an ancient thing. Connected to what is reaching for the sky. The light. The clear blue. Yet here I am, breathing through a rust colored haze. Looking out at an endless stretch of scorched earth shrouded in smoke.

I know there are other realities out there even if I can't see them. I know that despite the apocalyptic scene I am facing, north of here there is a cool stream running through a dense and peaceful forest. Alive and growing. And I know that despite all the bad news that is clogging every feed, there is good news unreported. I know that for every horrible thing a human is capable of, there are equal and greater greatnesses being attempted. I know there are humans petting baby goats, and laughing with friends, and feeding those who are hungry. I know there are humans rubbing tired feet, and walking excited dogs, and tossing ecstatic children overhead. Catching them. Teaching them it's safe to fly and it's ok to fall. There are people who love you enough to catch you on the way down.

We're so eager to share videos of violence and corruption and greed. We're so eager to comment, to spew, to almost relish the depravity of it all. Yeah yeah, humans can be really fucking awful. Humans can also sing songs and write poetry. Humans can wonder at the stars and build machines to take them closer. What are we trying to prove? That the world is in fact ending. Every single moment, the world is beginning. We give shape to the world. What stories do we tell our children? What stories are our children telling us? And do we listen?

Now please don't get me wrong. My heart is breaking too. I hold an ocean of tears for the injustice and bigotry and inhumanity that is playing far too great a role in shaping the reality we are all trying to cope in. I am disgusted and horrified and devastated plenty. There is no shortage of sadness for the hurt that humans are inflicting on others and on themselves. I would love to have the answers. I would love to heal the world. I would love to have the right words to convey my care, my compassion, my ache to somehow fix things, make things better. But at the end of each day, at the end of each long scroll through my social media feed, it's just me. Overwhelmed. Speechless. Trying in the ways that I am able to simply be a person others would want to share the day with, or invite to a birthday party, or ask for help moving. Just a human trying for unbiased kindness. Hoping to inspire tenderness. Striving to bring some semblance of peace to a hectic afternoon. Small gestures.

I believe in the magnitude of love in small scale. I believe that you can change the world with a silent touch as much as shouting from the mountaintops. Some people need to be loud. Let them. We need their voices. And I am grateful for their courage in speaking. But some people need to speak volumes in quieter ways. Let them also. It does not mean they don't care. It means they have different ways of sharing their care. Sometimes in our hope to right wrongs, we use the language of the oppressors. We become dogmatic and insist that there is only one way to fight the good fight. But in hoping for tolerance and equality, we must extend the same grace towards that which we are seeking.

I understand that there is a lot of anger right now. I understand that there is plenty to be angry about. I understand that anger has a place. Anger is sadness put into action, no longer willing to be helpless. But pain moves people in different ways. We need to leave space for all the ways we are trying to make sense of this great big wound. We need to hear all the words. We need to try and understand all the truths. And yes, sometimes we need to sit in silence too. We need to keep striving. Hoping that in the multitude of voices, the diversity of experience, the variations of expression, there is a truth universal enough to heal the chasm. I want to keep my heart open to that possibility. That one act of violence hurts us all, especially the one holding the gun. While each act of love, of acceptance, of care, heals us all.

The people that sell us the news are stuck on projecting the image that shocks us most. The world the screens are showing us is a bleak and awful place. We need to be careful about what lens we let ourselves look through. We need to adjust our focus. And then, we need to paint a different picture, every brush stroke, every color.

the lovelyLaëtitia Wajnapel, aka Mademoiselle Robot, was one of the generous humans that provided friendship and a place to sleep on my recent odyssey through Europe. a few days before I returned to the States, she interviewed me in her flat in London for her podcast Spirit Animal. listen if you'd like to hear my thoughts, feelings, reflections, and general musings on my experience over the past few months.

I have a sentence stuck in my head. Like a pop song you hear in a gas station late at night, not realizing you've heard it and then unable to get it out of your head. I am not her anymore, is the sentence that's been singing in my head. I am not her anymore. The only response I can manage when people are perplexed by my apprehension for returning to Los Angeles. "Why don't you want to go back to LA? LA is so lovely." And she is lovely, so lovely. But a return to LA feels like a backwards step in the midst of a passionate moving forward. I feel a momentum that has been building in me. A self-propelling trajectory towards space unknown but worth exploring. LA is something I know. I'm not ready to surrender the freedom of my unknowing. And while LA is full of so many things that I love, and so many things that I have loved, I am not her anymore.

And who was she? And who is the me that is no longer her? She ordered her entire world around a reality that no longer exists. A love that was once one thing and now is something else. Love transformed. I am still learning what it means. He is not "mine" anymore. And I am not his. He. Me. No longer we. He is still sleeping in the bed we bought together. But we have surrendered the label implying oneness. The flawed math equation we've all been shown in all the books and movies: 1+1=1. While they taught us so young that 1+1=2. The earliest of lessons. The simplest of facts. And so begins the grand struggle. The confusing contradiction. I am learning to rectify the discrepancy of what I think I want and what actually feels good having. I want union, but not at the expense of my liberty. I want romance, but I don't want to be locked in a tower until it comes.

With work, and patience, and forgiveness, the union I once shared with him has now grown into a beautiful friendship. There is still tremendous love and a deep sense of caring. But partnership and all its bonds, its obligations, all its hopes and plans and expectations, those are gone. I am not her anymore. She expected so many things. She hoped for so much. She was always painfully disappointed. He always felt he was falling short. An agonizing push and pull. Never enough rest. Never enough letting go. Always fighting to find a way to make 1+1=1, when I knew the truth. I don't want to be anything but me until I can figure out how to hold enough space for her in a we. And I don't want to make anyone feel small in the shadow of my great expectations. And I don't want to abandon the expectations I have for myself in helping someone else achieve their own.

So here I am, living with this eternal math problem to solve: 1=1, when sometimes it can feel like 1=0. I like this homework I have given myself. I like being here. I am exactly where I want to be. I couldn't be there, being her anymore. She had lost too much of herself. So here I am, exploring, discovering, finding. getting rid of the things that no longer serve me. Delighting in the rediscovery of things cherished but abandoned. Realizing some hard truths, and celebrating some really lovely ones as well. Trying to be someone I'd want to be with, whether or not that person comes.

Through this process, I have been "putting myself out there". And over the past few months I have managed to feel things for a few he's not hims. New boys and men to fall for and watch myself in that falling. Watching the terror spread across my face. Watching me frantically search for the rip cord only to realize I'm completely naked.

I am afraid of being hurt, because I am still hurting.

My fear is scary, and quite frankly, not very attractive. And so they walk (or run) away, while I sit with that familiar feeling. A reminder of a wound I am always healing. After falling for one of them, he sat down with me on a park bench and told me I was "too hectic", "too dramatic", and that what I needed to do was "chill" or no dude would be able to stand me. He didn't know the hurt of his careless words. Or maybe he did. Something strangers sometimes fail to remember when they meet you is that you've lived your whole life up to that moment without knowing they exist. All the you before them. And they are just learning the you of this moment. A sound bite from the symphony of your years. How can we possibly know all the life lived? The loves. The loss. The ancient wounds and forever hopes. All the effort. All the bravery. All the shame. How can we really understand how hard someone is trying? I am trying so hard to tend to this tender heart.

Lately I have been having strange chest pains. The kind that in my more vulnerable moments I worry is a definite sign of a heart condition and impending death. A solitary death in a foreign bed. Yes, I can be dramatic. Being alive and not knowing when you won't be anymore is the most dramatic thing I can possibly imagine. Excuse me for happening to live in a state where I am choosing to acknowledge that existential tension. I let that boy on the bench make me feel silly for the intensity of my feelings. Apparently that's what I wanted, what I needed. I agreed to meet him in his "break-up park". And yes, I walked away feeling like a dummy. But, with a few days, a lot of meditation, and good talks with wise friends, I was able to return to my truth: that he doesn't know me. He only knows how it made him feel to try and know me. I don't need to give myself up to someone else's lack of understanding. And maybe I was just the mirror that showed him his own hectic heart. Easier to point fingers than to sit with yourself.

And that's what all of this is, what it's always been, and what I hope it will always be—just learning the truth of our hearts through loving. Trying to love. Failing to love. Going on awkward dates. Having unexpected weekend flings. Going out hoping and meeting no one. Finding the love of a lifetime. All this opening and closing and opening again. Swapping fluids and shedding tears. Watching yourself fall and fail and lose and find. Finding yourself always on the other end of whatever journey you gather the courage to take. Finding yourself and falling in love. Leaving space. Letting 1+1=2.

When I land in Los Angeles in a couple of days, after hectically hurtling through space at hundreds of miles per hour, I will land to feel the chill of standing still. Even if only while I wait for my luggage. And then I'll walk out of LAX and get in a car that will merge onto the 105 East to the 110 North. And traffic allowing, I'll be flying along the freeway, looking at this lovely city that has been my home for so long, and that now, may just be a place I am visiting on my way to finding the me that is no longer she.

My sister and I are sitting in a small idyllic cafe in Venice. It is early evening and outside the pale blue day is starting to darken, while our tangerine pink “spritz’s” are glowing like lamplight. We are both crying. The sweet family of four sitting next to us is trying not to notice. But we are really crying—the kind of cry a lifetime produces. We are crying for the 28 years we have known and loved and battled each other. We are talking about all of it. All the tricky bits, the painful parts, the stuff you avoid because it’s deep and it hurts. The struggle to connect, the desire to understand, the attempt to hold space for the difference, and the corresponding failure to do so. The tenderness that comes with loving someone you don’t always know how to love best. And it is beautiful. I mean really, life is made for these moments. Two American women, in Italy, crying in a cafe. Two women sharing the same mother, the same father, the same brothers, the same history and yet, different memories of it all, both valid in their contrast. The contrast gives shape to the truth of our hearts. And to have those shared, but dissimilar memories, this is the gift of a sister. That perspective, that sometimes tough love, that hard truth. But ultimately is it love, such a tremendous love. I know the color of your pain, and the weight of your journey, the brightness of your joy. You are my sister, we are so alike, and so different, and here we are together celebrating it all.

And how does this long overdue cry come about? Simple really, we took a trip together. We met in Berlin, and then traveled to Munich, the Alps, Venice and finally Vienna. All in 9 days, all by train. An ambitious adventure for two ambitious women. A guaranteed meltdown. Humans of the earth, is there something you’re aching to abstract? Take a trip. A relationship you’re trying to get to the bottom of, take a trip together. Go somewhere foreign. Have jet lag. Pack too much into too short a time. Travel a good distance. Get lost, and argue over directions, so hungry looking for a restaurant you can both agree on. Let the pressure build, the annoyance arch, and then, order a Campari spritz. Cheers to what comes next. The truth. Openness that familiar places, familial spaces, old patterns and bad habits have kept at bay. You are in a new and unknown terrain, open to roaming, slightly delirious from trying to steal much needed sleep while in transit. It is the perfect recipe for a breakdown, a letting down of walls, a peek into the private parts of ourselves we haven’t known yet how to share. Be a witness to each other’s crumbling, hold each other in the rubble, and I dare you not to either never want to see that person again, or to love them more than you thought you could. I love you more now, Heather, and I loved you so much before.

You are my little sister, but you have grown. You are such a beautiful woman. You stand so tall even though you are shorter than me. You hold such strength and grace in your quieter way. I know I was loud. It must have been hard to find a space to speak. But you spoke nonetheless. And your voice is so powerful. And I am so proud you are my sister. And I am proud of you for hoping and hopping across the pond to share this magnificent adventure with me. Your courage inspires me, as I hope to inspire you. That we can inspire each other. That we can see each other. That we may be a mirror for how beautiful we both are. Such is the gift of a sister. How wonderful it is to call you mine.

I am full of all the words I haven't written yet. I feel them. they dance in my dreams, they wake me up at night. I know it is through writing, that I find myself, revealed. I know it is through forming the words as yet unwritten that I will learn the truth of my heart. so I sit down and I write. and sometimes, I don’t.

sometimes I look at my phone, for hours, literally, hours. sometimes I stare into space, or focus in on the wall or a window or the ceiling or my hands. sometimes I watch 5 minutes of 20 netflix movies and then go back to my phone. sometimes I feverishly pick at the skin around my fingernails until I bleed and feel disturbed by my own self-destruction. sometimes I eat a lot of random things I find in the cupboards, alternating between salty and sweet until I feel sick and immobile. sometimes I take a bath planning to read and instead just sweat and think and cry. sometimes I read one page of a book and then go back to my phone. sometimes I read hundreds of pages of a book and manage to forget about technology and how it has put me in an almost constant state of wondering if my phone might finally, once and for all, have a message waiting for me that will make ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN MY LIFE. that perhaps I’ve finally received the email of all emails, the discovery of a massive trust fund left by a stranger in my name. or perhaps a text message from a special someone begging to make me FOREVER HAPPY never to suffer again.

and sometimes I make myself laugh alone. these are some of my favorite moments, where I’m afforded a brief and beautiful bird’s-eye view of how funny it all is, how funny I am. how wonderful, how silly, how magnificent. me in bed eating chocolate, trying not to dirty the sheets. me on a walk desperately looking for eyes to make contact with, just double checking that I do indeed exist. me on a boat in Italy, me on a train in Germany, me on a plane in the sky, going somewhere, anywhere. I am constantly moving so my outsides can match my insides. matching the without with the within. the worst thing is feeling crazy because what you are told and what you feel don’t agree. when your body says A and the world around you says B. when you’re sure you shared something special with someone who is now flinging insults via text like angsty monkeys throw poo in the zoo. careless. confused. frustrated with the bars and you looking in. we build our own cages. we sell our own tickets to the show. we let people in and we get angry when they see us. why do we seek so to hide, when what we really seek is to be seen? really seen. acknowledged as something more than just another smear of a face on the metro.

I am all the people who have seen me. I am the words I have heard, whether true or false, they take up residence inside me. sure some are filed away on dusty shelves in dark halls long forgotten, but there they sit nonetheless. I am looking for myself when I am looking for you. you are doing the same, don’t call me names you’re not willing to call yourself. we all do it. we all hope to find something out about within through the outside eyes of another. show me the me I cannot see. we all long to learn the truth of what we feel because madness isn’t shouting at yourself and strangers in the street, madness is pretending you’re not when you are.

the truth shall set us free. free from the insanity we feel but are afraid to face. sanity is saying, “yes, I see you, yes I hear you and I promise not to pretend I don’t.” sanity is holding space for all the ugly truths and letting them lie next to all the beautiful ones. sanity is acknowledging that you don’t know, that you are afraid, that you want to but don’t know how. that you are just trying to find someone to love enough to realize how lovable you are, how lovable we all are. the ugly truths don’t change that fact, but we’re so trained to think they will. and that is its own form of insanity, and we all suffer from it.

I am afraid if I let you see me in my cage, that you’ll just take a selfie of yourself with me in the background and then walk away. mildly amused, slightly disturbed. ultimately unmoved to come any closer. unbearably untouched. inevitably headed to check out the cute girl behind the counter at the snack bar. I don’t want to be someone’s snack. I want to be a 5 course meal painstakingly prepared and slowly slowly oh so slowly consumed, delighted with, drunk on, enraptured in. only to want to do it again tomorrow. sweetly sleeping, full and wanting for more. in seeking communion, I am seeking the truth. in seeking companionship, I am just seeking the ability to finally be able to sit alone with myself. it may seem backwards, but that’s the way we get at things sometimes, in reverse. I am determined to match what I am shown with how I feel inside. I seek that peace. when I am alone, and it is quiet, and I find stillness inside to match the outside, I feel how lovable I am. I know I am learning, over time, how to hold that knowing in the presence of others. and through this process, I know I am simply hoping to show the truth of how lovable we all are, ugly truths and all.

I am listening to justin bieber in my headphones. I realized earlier today that the playlist I had made, self-titled "good vibes", was actually quite depressing. typical me to attempt something meant to make me feel good which actually makes me feel worse. thank god for bieber, always providing the great abs and the good vibes.

I am writing at a posh organic cafe in London. outside it is raining. everyone is walking in twos and threes, holding umbrellas for each other. I am lonely and keeping my eyes peeled for people walking alone. nothing new. despite my struggles with it, despite the tears, the difficult nights, this is something I have chosen time and time again. no one has forced me into these solo journeys. I just keep hopping across ponds, solitary, seeking something, something that doesn't have a name, yet. I am a namer of things. I am starting to realize this makes me hard to date. there I said it, I am trying to date. I'll be honest, I have withheld this part of my process because I don't want to hurt anyone. I am just trying to mend my heart, mend the hearts of others through my own healing, whether or not that's possible. but I am holding back on something that is pushing at the gates, I am doing everyone a disservice, including myself. I am not sharing this part of my experience.

I am so fucking confused. what the fuck? I mean really. men are from mars, women are from venus? I could have sworn we were all taking up residence on planet earth. why is it such a struggle to connect when we are all so connected in our want for it? why since time immemorial have men and women only managed to frustrate and confuse each other into writing songs or poems or jokes about our shared attempts at love? from where I stand, it seems at best all we manage from each other is inspiration for our own selfish pursuits, and at worst we manage to find ourselves in a wet gutter weeping and longing for all the lost love alone (just me?). sure sure, I am being hyperbolic, but these feelings, when in the throws of them, they are hyperbolic. I can observe them with my mind as they grip at my heart and I can say, "dude, chill. slow your roll. take it easy." but then I find myself immobile, lying on a blow up mattress in someone else's house just wishing that that one guy I saw at the burger joint could hold me. he held his burger so well. I want to use him for his arms. I'd let him use me for whatever it is he's wanting in exchange. we could be confUSED together, instead of just plain ol' confused alone. let me deal with the emptiness in the morning.

now understand, I know I am saying A BUNCH of things we're NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY!!! especially if we are trying to date, but I've had enough of the pretending, the preening and prancing around the painful truth. playing it cool is so uncool, and so very boring. nothing is cooler than the truth. so allow me to wow you with my truth: I am lonely. if I say it out loud, does that guarantee I will continue to be so indefinitely? I can hear the lads running away as I speak. does anyone actually read this? do the guys that find me on tinder read my blog?

tinder—torture for the tender. my tech illiterate friend once hilariously called it "tender". tinder, is far from tender. it is psychological warfare. it is an olympic medley of the mind, an elaborate obstacle course of the heart. it is a song and dance in a loud crowded club, too dark to see, too packed to move. paralyzed by the flashing lights, I am trying not to have a seizure. and yet, I put on my metaphorical push up bra and my symbolic short leather skirt and I pucker and pout my way through the doorman's assessment and seek some sick sort of solace in the throws of swiping right every night. I window shop for love. the store is closed, but the lights are on. I look in and imagine what it would be like to possess the goods behind the glass. I look until my eyes burn and I can barely keep them open. it's gross, I mean really, it's embarrassing. it's a real doozy when you're embarrassed by yourself and no one can even see you.

if it sounds bleak, it is because it feels bleak. I know that's not sexy to admit, but I am exhausted from hiding and the bags under my eyes aren't hiding anything, they tell my secrets when I fail to. I am trying to find enough peace for a good night's sleep. what I have been doing has not been working. I am tired. I know the answer isn't in the arms of another. I know this. but my body aches to be held. so what then?...

I hold myself. that's what. I mean I actually use my own arms to hold me. I wrap them around myself tightly and I talk out loud and tell myself nice and comforting things. and that embarrasses me a great deal less than my zombie-eyed search for digital love. me and my analog heart, trying to get along, trying to communicate. some days are better than others. but I am trying and I love myself for that. I am trying so hard. and unlike all the dudes too scared to, I can handle myself.

The first time I traveled alone, I went to China. I was 20-years old. I had wanted to go with my boyfriend, my first love, my moon, my stars, my everything. But he had other plans, namely to dump me and start dating a girl named, China (true story). So alone I went, broken-hearted, to discover China on my own, while he discovered, China, from the comfort of his own bed.

I was raised in rural America. I was raised to be afraid. Of strangers, of tornados, of god’s wrath, of pretty ladies with cleavage, of pretty much everything. Fortunately for me, the one thing I have always been most afraid of, is a life half-lived due to fear. So afraid I head out nonetheless. Surrendering to the call of a heroine’s journey is only slightly less scary than staying home while adventure is something happening elsewhere to other people.

Morocco was no exception. Despite my years and experience, I was still nervous the night before my trip. I barely slept. When I woke at 5am to catch the early morning train to Munich, I was tired and anxious, but also, effervescently excited. From Munich, we took a plane to Lisbon, for 23 delicious hours of wandering the cobblestone streets and eating pastéis de nata and drinking vinho verde. Portugal is comfortable and manageable and familiar, I was hesitant to get on the plane to Marrakech the next day, not knowing what I would find on the other side…

When my fellow adventuress, Nadin, and I arrived in the Marrakech airport, I must admit, my first impression wasn’t pleasant. It smelled like a bathroom, a well used-one. And then, the horrifying discovery that my worldwide cell phone plan did not extend to Northern Africa. Here I was, in a strange land without access to google maps and Instagram. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I panicked. I scrambled. I paced around breathing through my mouth, trying to acclimate, trying to think straight.

And then, we were thrust out into the seemingly harum scarum world that is Marrakech— the covered women, the narrow streets, the cars, the mopeds, the donkey drawn carts carrying yesterday’s garbage. No slowing down despite the tight corners, people walking unfazed by the treacherous conditions of too much motion in too small a space. Calm on their faces as my heart raced. So much to take in. Too much. My first day in Morocco I was unsure if I’d make through to the last page, the 11 remaining days of this epic tale.

Our first night, we dove headfirst into Jemaa el-Fnaa, the infamous night market. As we weaved our way through hundreds of bodies swirling in the dark, I struggled to feel safe. Utter and complete chaos. The florescent stands with pyramids of oranges stacked for juicing, the giant cauldrons full of steaming snails, the water peddlers with tin cups dangling on their chests, massive tasseled hats fountaining from their heads. I am sure I am not the first to use the phrase “sensory overload” in describing this experience. Gnawa bands competed for sonic space with their cacophonies of dueling sound waves. Ecstatic dancers danced and spun and shook to banging banjos and iron castanets. Vendors called, clanging, accosting passersby, inviting us all to buy their wares, to eat their treats. I wanted to wrap myself in gauze, hideout, retreat. That night I fell asleep nervous for the days ahead of me. I longed for the peace of my familiar bed. How would I survive this strange and unpredictable land? Would I make it out alive or get lost irretrievably to the unknown?

And then the next day something started to shift, my body began to adjust, my heartbeat started to synch itself with the rhythms of this new world. Humans are amazing in their innate ability to adapt to a new place. We are hardwired to readjust, it is the most basic of survival skills. What had just the day before been an indecipherable labyrinth of endless turns into unknown alleyways, suddenly started to feel like a maze I could master. I felt a calm settle itself in my belly, and a soft confidence arose. I didn’t necessarily know where I was going, but I knew I was finding my way.

And here’s where the real challenge presented itself, here’s where Morocco really shines, I started to understand that if I was going to enjoy this trip, if I was really going to give myself to this mystical land, I had to start trusting strangers. I had to surrender to their willingness to lead the way when I asked for directions. If I was going to get to where it was I needed to go, I was going to have to start ignoring all life’s previous warnings to never get in a van with a stranger. I had to trust over and over and over again while I was in Morocco. Trust men at night in dark alleys when part of me was screaming, “No!” while knowing the “no” wasn’t coming from the part of me that really knows, it wasn’t the genius of my guts or the wisdom of my heart, it was my head that said no, it was years of fearful training. It was a lifetime of lessons forced upon me by fear mongering old ladies at church and waxy faced newscasters on TV. “The world isn’t safe.” “Strangers are not to be trusted.” “Women should not travel alone.” But despite my head, my body said yes. My body quickly learned that I was safe, that humans are here to help each other. That strangers are just friends whose names you haven’t spoken yet.

Don’t get me wrong, I am under no delusions that the world doesn’t hide dangers, I am all-too-aware of the violence that lurks in the dark, especially for single female travelers. But I also know that I just spent 2 weeks traveling around Northern Africa, full of Muslims that showed such tremendous kindness in their eyes and in their hearts. When I smiled, they smiled. When I asked for help, they helped. When I was hungry, they fed me. When I was lost, they led the way. I can only hope that back home, I would offer the same to a foreigner in the strangeness of my land. That all people, everywhere, would realize that despite all the bad news, all the horror stories relentlessly shared and shoved down our throats, that they are just a small part of a much larger and all too often untold story. The daily desire of all of us, to live in peace. To sit down and laugh and share food with friends and family, to see new places, to learn new things, to find joy in sharing the glory of a sunset. I travel to remember that the more I trust, the more I am cared for. The more I open my heart, the more hearts I am lucky enough to meet. Life is so much richer when I trust in the kindness of strangers, when I believe that it is not violence, nor danger, nor hate, but love that is the currency which moves life.

of all the job descriptions for a writer, of any artist really, one must surely be “good at getting lost in foreign lands". sure a writer must read as many books as the daylight or the lamplight will allow, and sure a writer must simply sit down and put paper to pen, learning what works and what doesn’t over time. and surely a writer must spend enough time loving and loathing the sound of their voice to be able to finally realize they have been using someone else’s, so that they may learn by contrast the sound of their own. and yes, a writer must think they are brilliant, so brilliant in fact that others MUST read their writing or risk leading only half-lived lives! and yes, a writer must also think they are a joke, a talentless hack ashamed to have ever even entertained the idea that they may have something worth saying. and then they should fight tooth and nail/skin and bone/blood and tears finding their way back to their truth. their knowing. the truth that the will to say it is enough.

all these things, yes, but a writer that has never been lost? why would they feel the need to write?

writers are typographers, words are maps. what use is a map to someone who has never needed to go anywhere other than where they already are? what drive is there to draw a course, to find a way out, to explain the bend in the road to another weary traveler, if you yourself have not known that abandon? you could just sit, knowing full well the contours of your couch, the contents of your kitchen. no need to write anything down, save maybe a grocery list for more bread and beer. you could sit and get lost in the land of the glowing box. I've certainly done enough of that to know it is its own kind of journey. and while you may get a rash on your ass from so much sitting, you can learn a lot from a screen.

and then there are mormon housewives writing sexy vampire stories, that is its own kind of travel, that is its own kind of map. a map of the body, its secret caverns, its burning lands. from the comfort of your own home, kids playing in the backyard, you can leave it all behind and sit in the center of a blood sucking love triangle. you can disappear into another place, scratch the deepest itch with a well-layed sentence, get touched in places that are begging in the dark. so perhaps one does not need to get on a plane to travel to foreign worlds, but why the hell not? why not see what the body feels like on another continent?

why not taste new flavors, embody new desires? the experience of longing for something you one minute earlier didn’t even know existed, such exquisite bliss! that discovery-- the self through what moves it. oh, so this is what that is for?! -- to taste this, to touch that, to miss this, to long for that. new muscles moving. a new tenderness.

and then, the only option, to write. to draw a map, a way back, an explanation to yourself of how you got somewhere you didn’t even know you were longing to go but now that you have been, desperately need to make a record for a hopeful return. the people you meet, the way back to the street that led you to the secret path, that took you to the private room, that introduced you to the beautiful stranger, that opened up the conversation, that stretched the mind, that pried open the heart. that man on the train that you can’t stop thinking about, can he stop thinking about you? did you lodge enough of yourself in his chest? does he feel the poke of your elbows in his ribs? he is living in you, that slightest of curves to the right of his historic nose. the way the sunlight lit up the morning of his night train hair. how gracefully his hand held his toothbrush. his teeth. his eyes were amber, alive. his voice still speaks. you fell asleep as he was reading in a foreign tongue. tongue to tongue you wished for communication. silence. you were on top, he was below, so close, so impossibly close, but not touching.

we have to hold these missings, these missed things, these almosts but nots. what is so different about the having and the have not? the holding and the wishing but can’t? is the chasm so great? or just a hop skip and a jump between? I have longed for the love of a man whose limbs were laced with mine, but could not get close enough to sooth that ache. I did not know the man on the train, but I slept in a bed of honey that night. something was holding me so sweetly. and then in the morning, him letting me see him, unkempt, impossibly beautiful brushing his teeth, that was a closeness that sits like a babbling brook in the space between my hips. its unspoken intimacy tickles and delights, it makes me feel ever so slightly like I am not anchored to this planet, like our surrender to gravity is a decision made moment by moment. it reminds me that I, like the earth, am made mostly of water, water that is charged to rush forth, become one with the sea. to sit and wait is to deny my wanting. I must flow towards the body that waits to receive me, it is there for me, it exists so that I may become it, become me. it calls me to be what I am, a river, a moving, flowing, fluid body meant to well forth, meant to become an ocean. I must draw a map, for me and for you, to find our way back to the ocean. we forget so easily.